^.UX MUNDI 



a Series of grtutites 



IN THE 



RELIGION OF THE INCARNATION 



EDITLD 



By CHARLES GORE, M.A. 

PRINCIPAL OF PUSEY HOUSE 
. FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD 






FROM THE FIFTH ENGLISH EDITION 




NEW YORK 
UNITED STATES BOOK COMPANY 

Publishers 



iJlqj 



tf 



|0 



TOs issue of LUX MUNDI is published in 
the United' States under an arrangement by which the 
author is paid a royalty on all copies sold. 



^Enttottg Press: 
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge. 



n 






ESSAYS AND CONTRIBUTORS. 



i. Faith. 

Rev. H. S. Holland, M. A., Canon of St. Paul's, sometime 
Senior Student of Christ Church. 

2. The Christian Doctrine of God. 

Rev. Aubrey Moore, M. A., Hon. Canon of Christ Church, 
Tutor of Magdalen and Keble Colleges. 

3. The Problem of Pain : its bearing on Faith in God. 

Rev. J. R. Illingworth, M. A., Rector of Longworth, some- 
time Fellow of Jesus and Tutor of Keble Colleges. 

4. The Preparation in History for Christ. 

Rev. E. S. Talbot, D. D., Vicar of Leeds, sometime Warden 
of Keble College. 

5. The Incarnation in relation to Development. 

Rev. J. R. Illingworth. 

6. The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma. 

Rev. R. C. Moberly, M. A., Vicar of Great Budworth, some- 
time Senior Student of Christ Church. 

7. The Atonement. 

Rev. and Hon. Arthur Lyttelton, M. A., Master of Selwyn 
College, Cambridge, sometime Tutor of Keble College. 



vi Essays and Contributors. 

8. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 

Rev. C. Gore, M.A., Principal of Pusey House, Fellow of 
Trinity College. 

9. The Church. 

Rev. W. Lock, M. A., Sub-Warden of Keble and Fellow of 
Magdalen Colleges. 

10. Sacraments. 

Rev. F. Paget, D.D., Canon of Christ Church, and Regius 
Professor of Pastoral Theology. 

11. Christianity and Politics. 

Rev. W. J. H. Campion, M. A., Tutor of Keble College. 

12. Christian Ethics. 

Rev. R. L. Ottley, M. A., Vice-Principal of Cuddesdon, late 
Senior Student of Christ Church. 



PREFACE. 



1. This volume is primarily due to a set of circum- 
stances which exist no longer. The writers found them- 
selves at Oxford together between the years 1875-1885, 
engaged in the common work of University education ; 
and compelled for their own sake, no less than that of 
others, to attempt to put the Catholic faith into its right 
relation to modern intellectual and moral problems. Such 
common necessity and effort led to not infrequent meet- 
ings, in which a common body of thought and sentiment, 
and a common method of commending the faith to the 
acceptance of others, tended to form itself. We, who once 
enjoyed this happy companionship, are now for the most 
part separated. But at least some result of our temporary 
association remains, which it is hoped may justify and 
explain the present volume. 

2. For this collection of essays represents an attempt 
on behalf of the Christian Creed in the way of explanation. 
We are sure that Jesus Christ is still and will continue to 
be the * Light of the Word.' We are sure that if men 
can rid themselves of prejudices and mistakes (for which, 
it must be said, the Church is often as responsible as they), 
and will look afresh at what the Christian faith really means, 
they will find that it is as adequate as ever to interpret life 



viii Preface. 

and knowledge in its several departments, and to impart 
not less intellectual than moral freedom. But we are con- 
scious also that if the true meaning, of the faith is to be 
made sufficiently conspicuous it needs disencumbering, re- 
interpreting, explaining. We can but quote in this sense 
a distinguished French writer who has often acted as an 
inspiration to many of us. Pere Gratry felt painfully that 
the dogmas of the Church were but as an ' unknown 
tongue ' to many of the best of his compatriots. ' It is 
not enough,' he said, ' to utter the mysteries of the Spirit, 
the great mysteries of Christianity, in formulas, true before 
God, but not understood of the people. The apostle and 
the prophet are precisely those who have the gift of inter- 
preting these obscure and profound formulas for each man 
and each age. To translate into the common tongue the 
mysterious and sacred language . . . ; to speak the word of 
God afresh in each age, in accordance with both the nov- 
elty of the age and the eternal antiquity of the truth, — 
this is what St. Paul means by interpreting the unknown 
tongue. But to do this, the first condition is that a man 
should appreciate the times he lives in. " Hoc autem 
tempus quare non probatis ? " ' * 

3. We have written then in this volume, not as 'guessers 
at truth,' but as servants of the Catholic Creed and Church, 
aiming only at interpreting the faith we have received. On 
the other hand, we have written with the conviction that 
the epoch in which we live is one of profound transforma- 
tion, intellectual and social, abounding in new needs, new 
points of view, new questions ; and certain therefore to in- 
volve great changes in the outlying departments of theology, 

1 Gratry, Henri Perreyve, Paris, 1880, p. 162. 



Preface. ix 

where it is linked on to other sciences, and to necessitate 
some general restatement of its claim and meaning. 

This is to say that theology must take a new develop- 
ment. We grudge the name ' development,' on the one 
hand, to anything which fails to preserve the type of the 
Christian Creed and the Christian Church ; for develop- 
ment is not innovation, it is not heresy : on the other hand, 
we cannot recognize as the true 'development of Christian 
doctrine' a movement which means merely an intensifica- 
tion of a current tendency from within, a narrowing and 
hardening of theology by simply giving it greater definite- 
ness or multiplying its dogmas. 

The real development of theology is rather the process 
in which the Church, standing firm in her old truths, enters 
into the apprehension of the new social and intellectual 
movements of each age: and because 'the truth makes 
her free,' is able to assimilate all new material, to welcome 
and give its place to all new knowledge, to throw herself 
into the sanctification of each new social order, bringing 
forth out of her treasures things new and old, and showing 
again and again her power of witnessing under changed 
conditions to the catholic capacity of her faith and life. 

4. To such a development these studies attempt to be a 
contribution. They will be seen to cover, more or less, the 
area of the Christian faith in its natural order and sequence 
of parts ; but the intention is not to offer complete theologi- 
cal treatises, or controversial defences of religious truths, 
it is rather to present positively the central ideas and prin- 
ciples of religion, in the light of contemporary thought and 
current problems. The only one of the essays in fact 
which has any degree of formal completeness is that on 
Christian Ethics, — a subject on which the absence of 



x Preface. 

systematic books of a genuine English growth seems to 
justify a more detailed treatment. 

5. The main omissions of which we are conscious are 
due to want of space. For instance, we should have been 
very glad to attempt a separate treatment of the subject of 
sin ; though we hope the line that would be taken about it 
has been sufficiently indicated by more than one writer. 1 
Again, we have left aside any detailed discussion of his- 
torical evidences ; but it will be seen that our attempt has 
been so to present the principles of the Christian faith as 
to suggest the point of view from which evidences are in- 
telligible, and from which they will, it is firmly believed, 
be found satisfactory. Once more, if we have not found 
room for a treatment of miracles, at least we hope that the 
Church's conception of God, as He manifests Himself in 
nature and in grace, which we have endeavored to express, 
will at once acquit us of any belief in capricious 'violations 
of law ; ' and will also suggest a view of the world as dis- 
ordered by sin and crying out for redemption, which will 
make it intelligible that 'miracles' should appear, not as 
violating law, but as a necessary element in its restoration 
as well as its completer exhibition; contrary, not to the 
fundamental order of the Divine working, but only to a 
superficial or mechanical view of it, or to a view which sin 
has distorted or preoccupation with physical science has 
unduly narrowed. 

6. It only remains to explain that we have written, not 
as mere individuals, but as ministers, under common con- 
ditions, of a common faith. This unity of conviction has 
enabled us freely to offer and accept mutual criticism and 

l See pp. I73- J 75. 2 43- 2 44, 265-268, 398-399- 



Preface. xi 

so that without each of us professing such 
responsibility for work other than his own, as would have 
involved undue interference with individual method, we do 
desire this volume to be the expression of a common mind 
and a common hope. 

C. G. 

Pusey House, 

Michaelmas, 1889. 



PREFACE TO FIFTH EDITION. 

The author of the essay * The Holy Spirit and Inspira- 
tion* has endeavored to obviate further misunderstanding 
of his meaning on one important point by rewriting some 
sentences on pp. 300-301, in accordance with the Corrigenda 
inserted in the Fourth Edition. 



SYNOPSIS OF CONTENTS. 



i. 

Faith. 



PAGE 



I. Faith;, its situation; its behavior; challenged by novel experi- 
ences; alarmed at its own perplexity 3-5 

Yet why alarmed ? 5 

Perplexity consistent with faith, when faith is stripped of its 
habitual corroborations from without : and summoned to sub- 
mit itself to internal observation . . . 5-7 

For faith is an elemental act of personal self: and, therefore, 
like all such acts, e. g., of thought ; will ; love ; is, necessarily, 
incapable of offering itself for scientific examination .... 7-9 
II. What is faith? 9,10 

The motion in us of our sonship in the Father ; the conscious 
recognition, and realization, of our inherent filial adhesion to 
God 11-13 

This intimacy of relationship is capable of indefinite growth, of 
'supernatural ' development 13 

The history of faith is the gradual discovery of this increasing 
intimacy I 3 _I 5 

The demand for faith is (a) universal, for all are sons ; (b) urgent, 
as appealing to a vital fact; (c) tolera?it, as reposing on existent 

fact 15-18 

III. Faith, an act of basal personality, at the root of all out-flowing 
activities ; is present, as animating force, within all natural 
faculties. When summoned out, into positive or direct action 
on its own account = Religion, i. e., the emergence, into open 
manifestation, of Fatherhood and sonship, which lie hidden 
within all secular life 18-24 

Faith, an energy of basal self, using, as instruments and material, 
the sum of faculties; therefore, each faculty, separately, can give 
but a partial vindication of an integral act of faith . . . . 24,25 

This applies to Reason ; compare its relation to acts of affection, 
imagination, chivalry ; all such acts are acts of Venture, using 
evidence of reason in order to go beyond evidence .... 25-29 

So faith makes use of all knowledge, but is, itself, its own motive. 
It uses as its instrument every stage of science ; but is pledged 
to no one particular stage 29-32 



xiv Synopsis of Contents. 



PAGE 



IV. Faith, simple adhesion of soul to God; yet, once begun, it has 
a history of its own; long, complicated, recorded in Bible, 

stored up in Creeds 3 2_ 34 

This involves difficulties, intricacies, efforts ; all this, the neces- 
sary consequence of our being born in the ' last days ' . . 34-37 
Yet to the end, faith remains an act of personal and spiritual 

adhesion 37, 38 

V. Faith not only covers a long past, but anticipates the future ; it 
pledges itself ahead, e. g., in the case of 'ordination vows.' 
Such pledges justified, because the act of faith is personal ; 
and the object of faith is final, i. e., ' Christ, the same yester- * 

day, to-day, and forever ' 38-44 



II. 

The Christian Doctrine of God. 

I. Object of the essay and attitude assumed 47~49 

II. A broad contrast between the God of Philosophy and the God of 

religion 49 

Attempts to get rid of the opposition (1) by division of territory; 
(2) by confusion of terms 49--5 1 

III. Religion demands that God shall be Personal, and stand in a 

moral relationship with man 5 2 ~54 

IV. Growth and purification of the religious conception of God . . 54-56 
V. Religion and Morals. Collision between the two in Greece, and 

its consequences. Synthesis of religion and morality among 

the Jews : and in Christianity 56-64 

Subsequent collisions between religion and morals within the 
Christian Church. The Reformation a moral protest. Im- 
morality of its later developments. Modern protest against 

these 64-68 

VI. Religion and Reason. Protest of Greek Philosophy against 
Polytheism. Christian Theology the meeting-point of Jew- 
ish religion and Greek Philosophy 68-71 

What Theology is. Objection to it from the side of (1) re- 
ligion, (2) Philosophy 71-74 

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity an appeal to the reason 74, 75 

Its answer to the speculative problems of Greek thought (1) as 
to what unity is; (2) as to the immanence of reason in 
nature 75 — 7^ 

The witness of the Fathers 7 8 , 79 

The doctrine of the Trinity the true Monotheism; the doc- 
trine of the Logos as personal yet immanent 79 

VII. The Christian doctrine of God, why challenged in the pres- 
ent day 79 

The deism of the last century. The new science of nature. 
Evolution restores the truth of the Divine immanence which 
deism denied. Pantheistic reaction 80-84 

The Christian doctrine of God the safeguard of rational re- 
ligion against deism and pantheism 84, 85 



Synopsis of Contents. xv 

PAGE 

VIII. The so-called ' proofs ' of the existence of God 85-87 

Parallel between the belief in God and the belief in nature . 87, 88 
Verification in experience the only 'proof.' Reason in both 

the interpreter of Faith . . . 88-90 



III. 
The Problem of Pain. 

The problem of pain admits of no new treatment, but the attempt 
to use it as an argument against Christianity calls for a re- 
capitulation of what may be said on the other side ... 93 

Pain is (1) animal, (2) human. 

(1) Animal pain is a thing of which we can only form im- 

aginative conjectures ; and these, besides being liable to 
exaggeration, are not of a nature to form premises for 
argument 93~95 

(2) Common-sense tells us that human pain contributes as 

(a) punitive, (b) purgatorial, (c) prophylactic, to the de- 
velopment of the individual and the race 95~9S 

Natural religion further views it as the necessary condition 
of approach, by sinful beings, to the Divine ; and looks 
for its fuller explanation to a future existence .... 98-100 

Christianity carries on the view of natural religion, and 
sees in pain and suffering, — 

(a) The antidote to sin 100-102 

(b) The means of individual and social progress . . . 102, 103 

(c) The source of sympathy with man 103 

(d) The secret of union with God 103, 104 



IV. 
Preparation in History for Christ. 

General considerations on the study of the historical preparation, 

as part of the study of the Incarnation 107-110 

Special value of such study in the present age of historical and 
scientific method, which 

may be able to gauge finally the value of naturalist theories 

of the origin of Christianity no, in 

may find its own congenial 'signs' in the beauty of mani- 
fold preparing process ; in the wonder of an apparently 

unique convergence of lines of preparation 111-114 

I. General preparation — in the world at large : 

(1) In the shaping of its external order 114-118 

(2) Through its inward experiences of 

Failure 118-121 

Progress „ 121-124 



xv i Synopsis of Contents. 



PAGE 



II. Special preparation — in Israel: 

(i) The singularity of Israel's external position at the critical 

moment of the Christian Era 124-129 

(2) The paradox of its inward character 129-132 

(3) The peculiar influences which had made it what it was . 132, 133 

a. Prophecy - I 33~ I 39 

b. The Law 139, 140 

c. The Course of its History 140-145 

III. The independence of the two preparations; the paradox of 

their fulfilment in one Christ 145-148 



The Incarnation and Development. 

I. The theory of evolution has recalled our minds to the * cosmical 
significance ' of the Incarnation, which was a prominent 
thought in (1) the early, (2) mediaeval church .... 151-156 
II. Theology and Science move in different but parallel planes : 

one gives the meaning, the other the method, of creation . 156, 157 
Thus the doctrine of ' the Eternal Word ' is compatible with 
all the verified results of scientific teaching on 

(1) energy 157 

(2) teleology 157-160 

(3) origin and antiquity of man 161, 162 

(4) mental and moral evolution 162-166 

(5) the relation of philosophy to Theology 166-168 

(6) the comparative study of religions 168-170 

while in the Christian view, it both illuminates and is illumi- 
nated by those results 170-172 

III. But when the planes intersect, and we say 'the Word was 

made flesh,' we are said to traverse experience .... 172 

(1) This charge is only a critical presumption . . . . 172,173 

(2) All novelties traverse past experience 173 

(3) Moral experience is as real as physical 173, 174 

(4) The Incarnation harmonizes with our moral experi- 

ence 174. T 75 

(5) By reorganizing morality it reorientates character . 175 

(6) It has therefore a true relation to all phases of 

human life 175-178 



VI. 

The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma. 

I. The principle of Dogma is not to be attacked or defended on 
ci priori grounds. The real question is whether the Incarna- 
tion, as asserted, is true or false. And this is a question for 
evidence - 181-183 



Synopsis of Contents. xvil 

PAGE 

Even scientific 'dogmata' differ less from religious dogmas 
than is sometimes supposed, in that (a) both are received on 
evidence, (b) both require an experimental verification, or 
(in so far as either are still held along with error) correction 183-187 

The acceptance of dogmatic truth is essentially reasonable. 
Its claims to (a) authority, (b) finality, are not the ground 
for accepting it, but a necessary outcome of the facts 

accepted in it 187-191 

II. The evidence for the Incarnation is as many-sided as human 

life 191-194 

But primarily historical. The crucial fact is the Resurrection 194-197 

Everything is involved in the answer to ' What think ye of 

Christ?' '. . 197,198 

It is an error to think of the belief of the Church as an edifice 

built up in the age of the Councils 198, 199 

The decisions of the Councils represent only a growth in intel- 
lectual precision through experience of error 199-204 

The creed in its whole substance is the direct outcome of the 

fact of the Incarnation 204-207 

III. The dogmatic creed is to be distinguished from the body of 

theological literature which comments upon it 207 

Theological comment is variable : it may err, it may develop. 
Herein lie most of the disputes of technical, and the advances 

of popular, theology 208-212 

Even the creeds are human on the side of their language . . 212-214 

IV. The ' damnatory clauses/ though easily misunderstood, really 

mean what is both true and necessary 214-216 

l Christian dogmatism is, after all, devotion to truth for truth's s 

sake 216, 217 

V. The modern reading of the Scriptures without miracle and the 

Christ without Godhead depends for its justification upon the 

truth of an hypothesis 217-221 

But this hypothesis explains away, instead of explaining, the 

evidence; while it is itself incapable of proof 221-224 

Historical reality is essential to the truth of the Incarnation. 

Mere spiritualism ends in unreality . . „ 224-226 



VII. 
The Atonement. 

I. Sin and sacrifice in relation to the Atonement 229, 2^0 

io Twofold character of sin : — ' 

(a) A state of alienation from God 2 ?o 

(b) A state of. guilt ..............". 231, 232 

2. Twofold character of sacrifice : — 

(a) The expression of man's original relation to God . . 232, 233 

(b) The expiation of sin, and propitiation of wrath . . 233, 234 
Both aspects shown in the ceremonies of the Mosaic 

Law ••.•"'"............, 

3. Inadequacy of man's offerings to satisfy sense of personal 

guilt . . . 



b 



234, 235 
235-237 



xviii Synopsis of Contents. 

PAGE 

II. The death of Christ answers to the demands of the sense of 

sin and of the desire for forgiveness 237 

1. Christ's death a sacrifice of propitiation: — 

(a) Of the wrath of God, which is — 

(1) the hostility of Divine Nature to sin 238,239 

(2) the expression of the eternal law of righteousness 239, 240 

(b) By virtue — 

(1) Of the obedience manifested by Him .... 240,241 

(2) Of His recognition of the Divine justice . . . 241 

(3) Of His death as the necessary form of both . . 241, 242 
The propitiatory character of His death shown, — 

(i.) By the general relation between physical and 

spiritual death 242 

(ii.) Because of the nature of Him who endured 

it 243,244 

(iii.) Because of the results flowing from it . . 244-245 

(c) On behalf of men, for He is our Representative — 

(1) As Victim, by His perfect humanity our sin- 

bearer 245-247 

(2) As Priest, able to offer what man could not . . 247, 248 
The true vicariousness of His Priesthood . . . 248 

2. Christ's death the source of life 248, 249 

(a) As delivering us from sin 248 

(b) As bestowing new life 249 

\c) As uniting us to God ^ 249 

But only as connected with and issuing in the Resur- 
rection and Ascension 249, 250 

3. Christ's death in relation to man's responsibility .... 250 
^ {a) The Atonement, being forgiveness, must remit some 

of the consequences of sin . . 250, 251 

{b) But our mystical union with Christ ensures our share 

in the sacrifice . . . . 251,252 

(1) Not in its propitiation, which we can only plead . 252, 253 

(2) But by faith which accepts it and recognizes its 

justice • 253,254 

(3) And by following Him in obedience through 

suffering ■ 254,255 

III. Consideration of certain erroneous statements of the doctrine 255 

1. The implied divergence of Will in the Godhead .... 255,256 

2. The view of Redemption as wrought for us, not in us . . 256, 257 

3. The view that Christ redeemed us by taking our punishment 

instead of us 257 

(1) The essential punishment of alienation He could not 

bear • • 2 57 

(2) The penal sufferings which He bore are not remitted to 

us . 257 

(3) But He bore them that we, like Him, may bear them 

sacrifi daily, not as punishment 258 

IV. Short summary. 

1. The death of Christ as propitiatory J tested by expe- 

2. His death as transforming pain and death ) rience . 258, 259 



Synopsis of Contents. xix 



VIII. 
The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 

PAGE 

Christianity is an experienced or manifested life : because its 
essence is the possession of the Spirit, and the Spirit is 

Life 263-265 

I. The Holy Spirit the life-giver, — 

In nature 265-266 

In man „ 266 

In the gradual recovery of man from sin 267 

In Christ . . 267, 268 

In the Church 268, 269 

His work in the Church, — 

1. Social or ecclesiastical 269 

2. Nourishing individuality : both of character through the 

Sacraments, and of judgment through authority . . . 269-273 

3. Consecrating the whole of nature, material as well as 

spiritual 273, 274 

4. By a gradual method 274 

Imperfection of the Old Testament 274-276 

" of the Church » . 276, 277 

The Holy Spirit personally present and continually operative 

in the Church 277, 278 

II. The Theology of the Holy Spirit. Real but limited knowledge 

through revelation 278, 279 

He is (a) distinct in Person but very God, (b) proceeding from 
the Father and the Son, (c ) One in essence with the Father 

and the Son 279, 280 

The doctrine of the Trinity not Tritheistic 280, 2S1 

III. The Inspiration of Holy Scripture. Fatal results of not keep- 
ing this in context with the rest of the Holy Spirit's work 
in the Church 281-284 

1. It is an article of the Faith, not among its bases .... 264, 2S5 

2. It is a necessary article . 285 

3. Its certain and primary meaning, as seen by examination of 

the books of the Old and New Testaments 285, 291 

4. Its practical meaning and obligation 291-293 

5. Questions raised as to its meaning by Old Testament 

criticism : — 

(a) While the Old Testament is, like the New Testament, 
certainly and really historical, can it admit of elements 

of idealism in the narrative ? .... „ ... . 293-296 

(b) Can it admit of dramatic composition? 296,297 

(c) Can it admit the presence of primitive myths ? . . 297, 298 

6. The Church not prevented from admitting these to be open 

questions either, — 

(1) By any dogmatic definitions of inspiration .... 298, 299 

(2) By our Lord's language as to the Old Testament . 299-301 
We may expect the criticism of the Old Testament, like that 

of the New, to deepen and enlarge, not impair, our reverence 

for the ' Word of God ' e 301,302 



xx Synopsis of Contents. 



IX. 
The Church. 

PAGE 

The Church the final satisfaction of certain social instincts ; namely, 
the need of co-operation for life, for knowledge, and for 
worship 305 

These instincts are, — 

(1) Universal 305-307 

(2) Embodied in Judaism, and combined with the prin- 

ciple of God's election of one people to be a source 

of blessing to others 307-310 

(3) Fulfilled in the Incarnation ' 310 

I. The Church as the centre of spiritual life : offers its blessings, 

without limitation, to all who are willing to submit to 
spiritual discipline, and combines them in a brotherhood of 

common service 311-313 

Hence it is, of necessity, — 

(1) A visible body 313—315 

(2) Otie, both in its spiritual life and in external organiza- 

tion. This unity implied in the New Testament, 
and explained in the second century, as centring 
in the Episcopate. The Apostolical Succession is 
thus the pledge of historic continuity, and has 
always been the mark of the English Church. 
Loyalty to the Church is no narrowing of true 

sympathy 315-321 

II. The Church as the Teacher of Truth : primarily by bearing 
witness to truths revealed to it ; secondarily by interpreting 

the relation of these truths to each other 321-323 

Hence, — 

(1) It witnesses to the reality of central spiritual truths 

and teaches them authoritatively to its members . 3' 3, 324 

(2) It trains its members to a rational apprehension of 

these truths 324 

(3) It leaves great freedom on points not central . . . 324 

(4) It protects the truths themselves from decay . . . 325,326 
III. The Church the home of worship: worship the Godward ex- 
pression of its life ; its highest expression in the Eucharist ; 

its priestly work carried out from the first by a special class 

of ministers 326-329 

Each aspect of the Church's work completed by the co- 
operation of the Blessed Dead 329 

Causes of the apparent failure of the Church 3 2 9-335 

Need of its witness and work in modern times ...... 335, 336 



Synopsis of Contents. xxi 

X. 

Sacraments. 

PAGE 

Comprehensiveness a characteristic distinction of fruitful and 
enduring work : which will here be traced in the sacra- 
mental work of the Church ; with incidental reference to 
the evidential import of the inner coherence of Christianity, 

and its perfect aptness for humanity 339~34 2 

I. Christianity claims to be a way of life for men : whose nature 
and life involve two elements; which are usually distin- 
guished as bodily and spiritual . 342, 343 

The distinction of these two elements real ; their union 

essential . . . . 343,344 

It is to be inquired whether this complexity of man's nature is 
recognized and provided for in the Church of Christ . . . 344 

II. Grounds for anticipating that it would be so, — 

(1) In the very fact of the Incarnation; and more par- 

ticularly 344-346 

(2) In the character of the preparatory system whose 

forecasts it met 346, 347 

(3) And in certain conspicuous features of Christ's 

ministry 347 

The work of Sacraments to be linked with this anticipation . 347 

III. The prominence of the Sacramental principle in Christ's 

teaching: to be estimated with reference to the previous 

convictions of those whom He taught 347, 348 

There is thus found : — 

(1) Abundant evidence that the general principle of 

Sacraments is accepted, to be a characteristic of 
Christianity 348, 349 

(2) The authoritative appointment of particular expres- 

sions for this general principle : — 

Expressions foreshown in preparatory history ; 
anticipated in preliminary discourses ; ap- 
pointed with great solemnity and emphasis . . 349-351 
[These expressions such as may be seen to be intrinsi- 
cally appropriate, ethically helpful and instructive, 
and safeguards against individualism] 344-351 

(3) An immediate recognition in the Apostolic Church 

of the force of this teaching, and of the necessary 
prominence of Sacraments 351, 352 

IV. The correspondence between the ministry of Sacraments and 

the complex nature of man appears in three ways : since, — 

(1) The dignity and the spiritual capacity of the material 

order is thus vindicated and maintained : so that 
unreal and negative spirituality is precluded, and 
provision is made for the hallowing of stage after 
stage in a human life 352-356 

(2) The claim of Christianity to penetrate the bodily life 

is kept in its due prominence by the very nature of 
Sacraments ; the redemption of the body is fore- 
shown ; and perhaps begun „ . 356-359 



xxh Synopsis of Contents. 



PAGE 



Sacraments [continued). 

(3) The evidences of mystery in human nature, its mo- 
ments of unearthliness, its immortal longings, its 
impatience of finite satisfaction, being recognized 
and accounted for by the doctrine of Grace, are met 
by Sacraments ; and led in an ordered progress 
towards a perfect end 359-362 

XI. 

Christianity and Politics. 

Introductory. The twofold problem of Christianity in its rela- 
tion to human society, — 

(1) To consecrate ; (2) to purify ......... 365-367 

I. The Church is neutral as to natural differences, e. g., the form 

of government, autocratic or democratic leaning .... 367-369 

II. The Church supplements the moral influence of the State, in 
respect of, — 

(1) The appeal to higher motives 370-372 

e.g., as to the duties of, — 

(a) Governors and governed 372-376 

(o) Owners of property ......„,. 376, 377 

(2) The support of the weak against the strong .... 377-380 

(3) The maintenance of religion 380-385 

III. The Church purifies the whole social life of mankind, — 

(1) By spreading Christian ideas 385,386 

(2) By maintaining the Christian type of character . . 386, 387 
Conclusion. The Church appeals to deeper needs than the 

State, and is therefore fundamentally Catholic, and only 
incidentally national . = 387, 388 



XII. 

Christian Ethics. 

General characteristics of the Christian ethical system . . . „ 391, 392 
Dogmatic postulates : — 

(1) Doctrine of God: God a Personal and Ethical Being 392-394 

(2) Doctrine of Man: his ideal nature; his destiny as 

related to the good through conscience and free- 
dom ; his present condition 394~398 

(3) Doctrine of Christ: Catholic view of His Person . . 398, 399 
I. Christ's revelation of the Highest Good 399-402 

The Kingdom of God : twofold meaning of the term . . 399-401 

Christian view of the world 401,402 

II. The Moral Law : its authority, sanctions, and content . . . 402, 409 
The basis of obligation found in the idea of personal 

relationship between God and Man . 402, 403 

The sanctions and motives of Christian Morality . . . 404, 405 

The Law of Duty embraced in the Decalogue 405-409 



Synopsis of Contents. xxiii 

PAGE 

III. Christ the pattern of character « . 410-423 

Conditions required in the perfect example 410,411 

Christ the pattern of filial dependence, obedience, and 

love 412-414 

Virtuous action seen to imply a harmony of the different 
elements in personality, postulating a threefold virtuous 

principle supernaturally imparted 414-416 

Christian character: the Christian personality in its rela- 
tion, — 

(1) To God — Christian Wisdom 416-418 

(2) To Man — Christian Justice 418-420 

(3) To Self — Christian Temperance 420 

(4) To the hindrances of environment — Christian Forti- 

tude 421-423 

IV. Christ the source of the re-creation of character 423-430 

Claim of Christianity to re-create character 423 

Dogmatic truths implied in the re-creative process . . . 423, 424 
Holiness dependent on a permanent relation to Christ . 424 
The Church a school of character, and sphere of indi- 
vidual discipline 424-427 

Christian ascetics, —their ground in reason, and effect on 

character 427-430 

V. The consummation of God's kingdom . . . . . . . . 430-434 

The intermediate stage 430 

The final stage of glory : 

(i) The kingdom to be finally manifested . . . . 431 

(ii) and purified through judgment 431 

Extent and limits of the final triumph of good .... 431-433 
Perfection of human personality : the perfect state one of 

harmony . . 433 

g ] ory 433 

blessedness .... = . 434 

and fellowship in a moral community 434 

VI. Conclusion : relation of Christian Ethics to the products of 

civilization, to individual character, to social life. . . . 435,436 



Appendix on some Aspects of Christian Duty 437-441 



I. 

FAITH. 

"V 

HENRY SCOTT HOLLAND. 



I. 

FAITH. 

I. In proposing to consider the origin and growth of faith, we 
have a practical, and not a merely theoretical, aim. We are think- 
ing of the actual problems which are, at this moment, encompass- 
ing and hindering faith ; and it is because of their urgency and 
their pressure that we find it worth while to go back upon our 
earliest beginnings, in order to ask what Faith itself means. For 
only through an examination of its nature, its origin, and its struc- 
ture, will it be possible for us to sift the questions which beset us, 
and to distinguish those to which Faith is bound to give an answer 
from those which it can afford to let alone. 

We set out then on our quest, in the mind of those who have 
felt the trouble that is in the air. Even if we ourselves be not of 
their number, yet we all suffer from their hesitation ; we all feel 
the imparted chill of their anxieties. For we are of one family, 
and the sickness or depression of some, must affect the whole 
body. All of us, even the most confident, are interested in the 
case of those who are fearing for themselves, as they sadly search 
their own hearts and ask, ' What is it to believe ? Do I know 
what it is to believe ? Have I, or have I not, that which can be 
called " faith " ? How can I be sure? What can I say of myself? ? 
Such questions as these are haunting and harassing many among 
us who find themselves facing the Catholic Creed, with its ring of 
undaunted assurance, with its unhesitating claim to unique and 
universal supremacy, and contrast with this their own faint and 
tentative apprehension of the strong truths which are so confi- 
dently asserted. Such men and women are anxious and eager to 
number themselves among those that believe ; but can they call 
this temper ' belief,' which is so far below the level of the genuine 
response which those Creeds obviously expect? Where is the 
blitheness of faith? Where is its unshaken conviction? Where 
is its invincible simplicity ? Why is it that they only succeed in 
moving forward with such painful indecision ? 

Now, it is to this temper that this essay is addressed. It does 
not aim at convicting a hostile disbelief, but at succoring a dis- 



4 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

tressed faith. And this it does under the conviction that, in so 
doing, it is responding to the peculiar character and needs of the 
situation. 

For the urgency, the peril of the hour, lies, not so much in the 
novelty, or force, of the pressure that is brought to bear against 
faith, as in the behavior of faith itself under the pressure. What 
has happened is, not that faith -has been confounded, but that it 
has been challenged. It has been challenged by new social needs, 
by strange developments of civilization, by hungers that it had not 
yet taken into account, by thirsts that it had not prepared itself 
to satisfy. It has been challenged by new scientific methods, 
wholly unlike its familiar intellectual equipment; by new worlds 
of facts opened to its astonishment through discoveries which 
have changed the entire look of the earth ; by immense masses 
of novel material, which it has been suddenly and violently re- 
quired to assimilate ; by strange fashions of speech in science and 
history ; by a babel of ' unknown tongues ' in all departments of 
learning and literature. 

Faith is under the pressure of this challenge ; and the primary 
question is, How will it behave ? What is it going to say, or do, 
in face of this exciting transformation which has passed over the 
entire surface of our intellectual scenery? How will it deal with 
the situation? Will it prove itself adequate to the crisis? To 
what extent can it afford to submit to the transforming process 
which has already operated upon the mind and the imagination? 
If it submit, can it survive? And in what condition? with what 
loss, or damage, or change ? On every side these challenges reach 
it ; they beat at its doors ; they arrive in pelting haste ; they 
clamor for immediate solutions. 

Now faith, under these rapid and stormy challenges, is apt to fall 
into panic. For this, surely, is the very meaning of a panic, — a 
fear that feeds upon itself. Men in a panic are frightened at find- 
ing themselves afraid. So now with faith ; it is terrified at its 
own alarm. How is it (it asks itself) that it should find itself 
baffled and timorous? If faith were faith, would it ever lose its 
confidence? To be frightened is to confess itself false : for faith is 
confidence in God, Who can never fail. How can faith allow of 
doubt or hesitation ? Surely for faith to hesitate, to be confused, 
is to deny its very nature. Thus many anxious and perplexed 
souls retreat before their own perplexities. Because their faith is 
troubled, they distrust and abandon their faith. The very fact that 
it is in distress becomes an argument against it. 

It is at this point, and because of this particular peril, that we 



I. Faith. 5 

are urgently required to consider very seriously the nature and 
conditions of faith. For our panic arises from our assumption that 
faith is of such a nature that the perplexity into which, now and 
again, we find ourselves thrown, must be impossible to it, must be 
incompatible with it. Now is this so? Ought we to expect of 
faith that its confidence should never fail it, — that its light should 
be always decisive ? Is faith incriminated by the mere fact that 
it is in difficulties ? 

Let us first consider what has occurred. Perhaps the situation 
itself, if we quietly review it, will give a reason why it is that just at 
the moment when we most need vigor and assurance, we should 
find ourselves stripped of all that tends to reassure. 

For the peculiarity of the disturbance which we have got to 
encounter, lies in this, that it has removed from us the very weapons 
by which we might hope to encounter it. Faith's evidential mate- 
rial is all corroborative and accumulative ; it draws it from out of 
an external world, which can never wholly justify or account for 
the internal reality, yet which can so group itself that from a hun- 
dred differing lines it offers indirect and parenthetic and conver- 
gent witness of that which is itself beyond the reach of external 
proof. It is this gradual grouping of an outer life into that assorted 
perspective in which it offers the most effective corroboration of 
the inner truth, which faith slowly accomplishes upon the matter 
which human science presents to it. When once the grouping is 
achieved, so that the outer world, known under certain scientific 
principles, tallies harmoniously with its inner convictions, faith 
feels secure. The external life offers it pictures, analogies, meta- 
phors — all echoing and repeating the internal world. Faith 
beholds itself mirrored; and, so echoed, so mirrored, it feels 
itself in possession of corroborating evidences. But the present 
scientific confusion seems to have shattered the mirror ; to have 
broken up the perspective; to have dissolved the well-known 
groupings. It is true, as some of the essays which follow will 
try to show, that the convulsion of which we speak lies, chiefly, 
in a change of position or of level ; so that great masses of the 
matter, now thrown into confusion, will be found to compose 
themselves afresh, under the newer conditions of review, and will 
appear again as part and parcel of the scientific scenerv. It is 
a change of perspective more than anything else. But, no doubt, 
such a change is just of the character to upset us, to disturb us; 
for, during the change, while shifting from the old position to the 
new, we are in the very chaos of confusion ; everything seems, 
for the moment, to be tumbling about around us ; the entire scene 



6 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

grows unsteady : though, indeed, when once we have got our feet 
firmly placed at the new level of vantage, much, that once was 
familiar, is discovered to be back again in its place, looking much 
the same as of old. It is the first shock of this enforced transi- 
tion which is so calculated to terrify ; as when, for instance, men see 
their habitual reliance on the evidence for design in nature, which 
had been inherited from Paley, yield, and vanish, under the review 
of the facts with which the theory of evolution acquaints them. 
What they feel is, that their familiar mode of interpreting their 
faith, of justifying it, of picturing it, has abruptly been torn from 
them. That which once seemed to evidence it in the outer world, 
has ceased to be accepted or trusted. The habitual ways of 
argument, the accepted assumptions, which they had hitherto 
used as their supports and their instruments, have been with- 
drawn, have become obsolete. Faith is thrown back on itself, 
on its own inherent, naked vitality ; it is robbed for the moment 
of that sense of solidity and security, which fortifies and refreshes 
it, when the outer world of natural facts, and the inner world of 
intellect and fancy, all corroborate its confidence in itself, by 
harmonious attestations of its validity. The old v/orld of things 
had been brought into this adaptation with the principles of belief. 
Faith was at home in it, and looked out over it with cheerfulness, 
and moved about it with freedom. But that old world is gone ; 
and the new still lies untested, unsorted, unverified, unassimilated, 
unhandled. It looks foreign, odd, remote. Faith finds no 
obvious corroborations in it : there, where it used to feel but- 
tressed and warm, it now feels chilly and exposed. 1 

This is the first consequence, and it is serious enough in itself 
to provoke alarm. Faith cannot be at ease or confident, until 
the outer world responds to its own convictions ; and yet ease and 
confidence are exactly what it is challenged to exhibit. 

And then, when a man, under this sense of fear, deprived of 
external testimonies, attempts to exhibit, to evoke, to examine, his 
inner conviction, in its inherent and vital character, as it is in itself, 
unsupported by adventitious aids, he is astonished at his own diffi- 
culty in discovering or disclosing it. Where is it all fled, that 
which he had called his faith? He had enjoyed it, had relied on 
it, had again and again asserted it in word and deed ; and now, 
when he wants to look at it, when he is summoned to produce it, 
when he is challenged to declare its form and fashion, he finds 
himself dazed, bewildered, searching helplessly for that which ever 

1 Cf. on all this, an excellent statement in Mark Pattison's Sermons, 
Sermon 7. 



I. Faith. j 

escapes him, grasping at a fleeting shadow which baffles his efforts 
to endow it with fixity and substance. And, so finding, he grows 
yet more desperately alarmed ; it seems to him that he has been 
self-deceived, betrayed, abandoned. He is bitterly sensitive to the 
sharp contrast between the triumphant solidity with which scienti- 
fic facts bear down upon him, certified, undeniable, substantial, and 
the vague, shifty, indistinct phantom, into which his conviction 
vanishes as soon as he attempts to observe it in itself, or draw it 
out for public inspection. 

Yet, if we consider what faith signifies, we shall see at once that 
this contrast ought to carry with it no alarm. It is a contrast 
which follows on the very nature of faith. If we had understood 
its nature, we could never have expected it to disclose itself under 
the same conditions as those which govern the observation of sci- 
entific facts. Faith is an elemental energy of the soul, and the 
surprise that we are undergoing at not being able to bring it under 
direct observation, is only an echo of the familiar shock with which 
we learn that science has ransacked the entire bodily fabric of man, 
and has nowhere come across his soul ; or has searched the heav- 
ens through and through with its telescope, and has seen no God. 
We are upset for a moment when first we hear this ; and then, we 
recover ourselves as we recollect that, if God be what we believe 
Him to be, immaterial and spiritual, then He would cease to be 
Himself if He were visible through a telescope; and that if the 
spirit of man be what we believe it to be, that is the very reason 
why no surgeon's knife can ever arrive at it. 

And as with the soul, so with all its inherent and essential acts. 
They are what it is : they can no more be visible than it can. 
How can any of the basal intuitions, on which our knowledge rests, 
present themselves to our inspection in the guise of external and 
phenomenal facts? That which observes can never, strictly speak- 
ing, observe itself. It can never look on at itself from outside, or 
view itself as one among the multitude of things that come under 
its review. How can it ? It is itself the organ of vision : and the 
eye cannot see its own power of seeing. This is why natural sci- 
ence, which is an organized system of observation, finds that its 
own observing mind is absolutely and totally outside its ken. It 
can take stock of the physiological condition of thoughts or of feel- 
ings ; but they themselves, in their actual reality, are all rigidly 
shut out from the entire area of scientific research. Wherever they 
begin, it ends ; its methods abruptly fail. It possesses no instru- 
ment by which to make good its advance farther. For the only 
instrument which it knows how to use, and by which alone it can 



8 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

search and examine, is itself the object which it desires to submit 
to examination. But if it is to be examined,, who, and what, is to 
conduct the examination? The observing mind that turns round 
to explore itself, carries itself round as it turns. It can never 
say : ' Let me look at myself, as if I were a phenomenon, as a fact 
presented to my own consciousness,' for it itself would be engaged 
in the act of looking; it itself is the consciousness to which it pro- 
poses to present itself. * So again, the thought itself can never 
hope, by rigid analyzing, to arrive at last at itself, as the final resi- 
due of the analysis, for it is itself, all along, employed as analyst. 
The process of analysis is, itself, the real disclosure of what thought 
is ; and this disclosure is made just as effectively even though the 
result of the analysis be to declare that it can discover nothing that 
corresponds to thought. It is, indeed, impossible that anything 
should so correspond, except the power to analyze ; but this power 
is thought ; and every act of the analysis, which issues in the scep- 
tical conclusion, has verified the real existence of thought. It is 
the same with all profound spiritual acts. None of them can ever 
be offered to public inspection ; they can never be handed across 
to another, for him to look at. For they are living acts, and not 
external results. How can an act of will, or of love, be submitted 
to observation? Its outward result is there to be examined; but 
it, itself, is incapable of transportation. If any one were to ask, 
'What is it you mean by thinking, or loving, or willing?' who 
could tell him? It would be obviously impossible to explain, ex- 
cept to a being who could think, will, and love. You could give 
him illustrations of what you mean — signs — instances — evi- 
dences ; but they can only be intelligible, as evidences, to one who 
already possesses the faculties. No one can do a piece of think- 
ing for another, and hand it over to him in a parcel. Only by 
thinking, can it be known what thought is ; only by feeling can it 
be understood what is meant by a feeling ; only by seeing, willing, 
loving, can we have the least conception of sight, or of will, or 
of love. 

And faith stands with these primary intuitions. It is deeper 
and more elemental than them all : and, therefore, still less than 
they can it admit of translation into other conditions than its 
own, — can still less submit itself to public observation. It can 
never be looked at from without. It can be known only from 
within itself. Belief is only intelligible by believing. Just as a 
man who is asked to say what love is, apart from all its outward 

1 It is not intended to deny that the mind can ever know itself, but only 
that such knowledge can ever be won by methods of empirical observation. 



I. Faith. 9 

manifestations and results, must be driven back on the iteration — 
' Love is — what love is ; every one who loves, knows ; no one who 
does not love, can ever know ; ' just as a man, who is challenged 
to describe and define his feelings or his desires, when stripped of 
all the outward evidences that they can possibly give of themselves, 
is thrown into inarticulate bewilderment, and can give no intelli- 
gible answer, and can fashion to himself no distinct feature or 
character, and can only assert, confusedly, that he feels what he 
feels, and that to desire is to desire ; — so with faith. The scien- 
tific convulsion has shaken and confused its normal modes of self- 
interpretation, its usual evidences, signs, illustrations : these outer 
aids at definition, by metaphor or by corroboration, are all brought 
under dim eclipse for the moment : their relative values have been 
thrown into uncertainty : they are undergoing temporary displace- 
ment, and no one is quite sure which is being shifted, and which 
can be trusted to stand firm. Faith, robbed of its habitual aids to 
expression, is summoned to show itself on the field, in its own 
inner character. And this is just what it never can or may do. It 
can only reiterate, in response to the demand for definition, ' Faith 
is faith.' ' Believing is — just believing.' Why, then, let ourselves 
be distressed, or bewildered, by finding ourselves reduced to this 
impotence of explanation? Far from it being an incrimination of 
our faith, to find ourselves caught in such a difficulty of utter- 
ance, it is just what must happen if faith be a profound and radical 
act of the inner soul. It is, essentially, an active principle, a source 
of energy, a spring of movement : and, as such, its verification 
can never take place through passive introspection. It verifies 
itself only in actions : its reality can only be made evident through 
experience of its living work. 

H. We may, then, free ourselves from the sinister suspicions 
which belong to panic. It is not the superficiality of our faith, 
which is the secret of our bewilderment, but its depth. The 
deepest and most radical elements of our being are, necessarily, 
the hardest to unearth. They are, obviously, the most remote 
from the surface of our lives : they are the rarest to show them- 
selves in the open daylight : they require the severest effort to dis- 
entangle their identity : they lie below all ordinary methods of 
utterance and expression ; they can only be discovered through 
careful recognition of the secret assumptions which are involved in 
the acts and words which they habitually produce. By these acts 
and words their existence and their force is suggested, but not 
exhausted — manifested, but not accounted for. These form our 
only positive interpretation and evidence : and such evidence 



io The Religion of the Incarnation. 

must, therefore, always remain inadequate, imperfect; we have 
always and inevitably to go behind it, and beyond it, in order to 
reach and touch the motive-energy which is disclosed to us through 
it. No wonder that we find this far from an easy matter. No 
wonder that, under the pressure of a hostile challenge, we often 
lose ourselves in a confused babble, as we struggle to make plain 
to others, or even to ourselves, these innermost convictions of 
our souls. 

Indeed, such things can never be made plain : no one ought to 
expect that they should. For, if we think of it, the primary acts 
of, spirit must be the last things that can ever be made plain ; for 
the entire life issuing from them is their only interpretation, so that 
only when that life is closed, can their interpretation be complete. 
And here, in faith, we are at the root of a life which, as we believe, 
it will take eternity to fulfil. And, if so, only in and through 
eternity can its full evidence for itself be produced, or its right 
interpretation be yielded. 

Surely, this truth clears us from many clamorous demands, which 
ask of us an impossible verification. For if once we saw that we 
were employed in verifying the nature of that which, if it be real, 
can, confessedly, present us, on this side of the grave, only with 
the most fragmentary evidence of its character, we should put 
lightly aside the taunting challenge to produce such proof of our 
motive principle as will stand comparison with the adequate and 
precise evidences of a scientific fact, or which will submit to the 
rigid tests of a legal examination. If faith be faith, it could not, 
for that very reason, fulfil the conditions so proposed to it. These 
legal and scientific conditions are laboriously and artificially limited 
to testing the presence of a motive, or a force, which must be 
assumed to exist under fixed, precise, complete conditions, here 
and now. They presuppose that, for all practical purposes, its 
quantity cannot vary, or fluctuate. It it be present at all, it is 
present in a distinct and formal manner, open to definite measure- 
ment, expressing itself in unalterable characteristics. The entire 
consideration of its activity is strictly confined to the normal 
horizon of the actual world of present existence. These assump- 
tions are the first necessity of all forms of science, without making 
which, it could not even begin. They are the conditions of all its 
success. But they are also its limitations : and as such, they most 
certainly exclude from their survey, anything that professes to exist 
after the manner of faith. For what is faith? It is no steady 
force, existing under certified and unvarying conditions which 
receive their final determination in the world about us. Faith is, 



I. Faith, ii 

while it is here on earth, only a tentative probation : it is a 
struggling and fluctuating effort in man to win for himself a valid 
hold upon things that exist under the conditions of eternity. In 
faith, we watch the early and rude beginnings, amid an environ- 
ment that but faintly and doubtfully responds to it, of a power still 
in the womb — still unborn into its true sphere — still enveloped 
in dark wrappings which encumber and impede. We see here 
but its blind, uncertain pushings, its hesitating moves, now forward, 
now back, now strangely vigorous and assertive, and then again, as 
strangely weak and retreating. Its significance, its interpretation, 
its future possibilities, its secret of development, — all these lie 
elsewhere, beyond death, beyond vision : we can but dimly guess 
from its action here, what powers feed it, on what resources it can 
rely, what capacity of growth is open to it, what final issue deter- 
mines the measure and value of its efforts and achievements here. 
Such a force as this is bound to upset all our ablest calculations. 
We can never lay down rules to govern and predict its capabilities. 
It will disappoint every conceivable test that we can devise for 
fixing its conditions. It will laugh at our attempts to circumscribe 
its action. Where we look for it to be weak, it will suddenly show 
itself strong ; when we are convinced that we may expect a vig- 
orous display of its capacities, it will mysteriously lapse. All this 
may terribly disconcert us. It may tempt us into angry declara- 
tions that such an incalculable existence is unworthy of scientific 
attention — is fanciful, is unreal. But the only lesson which we 
ought to learn is that methods adapted for one state of things are 
bound to prove themselves futile when applied to another. If we 
are employed in observing a life which has its ground and its end 
in a world beyond the present, then all methods framed for the 
express and definite purpose of examining life as it exists here and 
now, will necessarily prove themselves ludicrously inapt. The 
futility, the barrenness, the ineptitude of our researches, lies, not 
with the faith against which we level our irritable complaints, but 
with the methods which, by their very terms of definition, proclaim 
themselves to be misplaced. 

Where, then, must we dig to unearth the roots of faith? What 
are the conditions of its rise and exercise? Wherein lie its 
grounds, and the justification of its claim ? 

Faith grounds itself, solely and wholly, on an inner and vital 
relation of the soul to its source. This source is most certainly 
elsewhere ; it is not within the compass of the soul's own activity. 
In some mode, inconceivable and mysterious, our life issues out of 
an impenetrable background : and as our life includes spiritual 



12 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

elements, that background has spiritual factors ; and as our life is 
personal, within that background exists personality. This supply of 
life in which we begin, from out of which our being opens, can 
never cease, so long as we exist, to sustain us by one continuous 
act. Ever its resources flow in ; ever its vital support is unwith- 
drawn. In some fashion or other, we all know that this must 
be so ; and the Christian Creed only lifts into clear daylight, and 
endows with perfect expression, this elementary and universal verity, 
when it asserts that at the very core of each man's being lies, anc 
lives, and moves, and works, the creative energy of the Divine Will, 
— ' The Will of our Father Which is in heaven.' 

We stand, by the necessities of our existence, in the relationship 
of sons to a Father, Who has poured out into us, and still pours, 
the vigor of His own life. This is the one basis of all faith. 
Unless this relationship actually exists, there could be no faith : if 
it exists, then faith is its essential corollary : it is bound to appear. 
Our faith is simply the witness to this inner bond of being. That 
bond, which is the secret of our entire existence, accounting for all 
that we are, or do, or feel, or think, or say, must become capable 
of recognition by a being that is, in any sense, free, intelligent, 
conscious ; and this recognition by us of the source from whence 
we derive, is what we mean by faith. Faith is the sense in us that 
we are Another's creature, Another's making. Even as we not 
only feel, but feel that we feel ; not only think, but know that 
we think ; not only choose, but determine to choose : so, below 
and within all our willing, and thinking, and feeling, we are con- 
scious of Another, whose mind and will alone make possible both 
the feeling that we feel, and also the capacity to feel it ; both 
the thought that we think, and also the capacity to know it ; both 
the will that we put forth, as well as the power to determine 
it. Every act, e/ery desire, every motive of ours, is dependent on 
the source out of sight : we hang on Another's will ; we are alive 
in Another's life. All our life is a discovery, a disclosure, of this 
secret. We find it out only by living. As we put out powers that 
seem to be our own, still even in and by the very act of putting 
them out, we reveal them to be not our own ; we discover that we 
are always drawing on unseen resources. We are sons : that is 
the root-law of our entire self. And faith is the active instinct of 
that inner sonship ; it is the point at which that essential sonship 
emerges into consciousness ; it is the disclosure to the self of its 
own vital secret ; it is the thrill of our inherent childhood, as it 
makes itself felt within the central recesses of life ; it is the flame 
that shoots into consciousness at the recognition of the touch of 



I. Faith. 13 

our divine fatherhood ; it is the immediate response of the sonship 
in us to its discovered origin. 

Faidr, then, is an instinct of relationship based on an inner 
actual fact. And its entire office and use lies in realizing the 
secret fact. For the bond is spiritual ; and it can only realize 
itself in a spirit that has become aware of its own laws. No 
blind animal acceptance of the divine assistance can draw out the 
powers of this sonship. The reception of the assistance must 
itself be conscious, loving, intelligent, willing. The natural world 
can receive its full capacities from God without recognition of the 
source whence they flow in : but this absence of living recognition 
forbids it ever to surpass those fixed limits of development which 
we name ' natural.' But a creature of God that could not only 
receive, but recognize that it received, would, by that very recogni- 
tion, lay itself open to an entirely novel development ; it would be 
susceptible Of infinitely higher influences shed down upon it from 
God ; it would admit far finer and richer inpourings of divine suc- 
cors ; it would be fed, not only from underground channels as it 
were, but by fresh inlets which its consciousness of its adherence 
in God would uncover and set in motion. The action of God 
upon His creatures would be raised to a new level of possibility : 
for a living and intelligent will has capacities of receptivity which 
were altogether excluded so long as God merely gave, and the 
creature blindly and dumbly took. Faith, then, opens an entirely 
new career for creaturely existence ; and the novelty of this career 
is expressed in the word ' supernatural.' The ' supernatural ' world 
opens upon us as soon as faith is in being. 1 

And this career, it will be seen, is markedly distinct from the 
natural in this, — that it is capable of ever-advancing expansion. All 
natural things which blindly accept their life from God, must, 
perforce, have a decreed and certified development, limited by 
the conditions in which they are found existing. Their recep- 
tivity is a fixed quantity, determined by the character imposed upon 
them at creation, and bound to come to an abrupt arrest at some 
precise point. 2 But receptivity through conscious recognition is 

1 The word 'supernatural ' 5s obviously misleading, since it seems to imply 
that the higher spiritual levels of life are not ' natural.' Of course, the higher 
the life, the more intensely 'natural ' it is ; and the nature of God must be the 
supreme expression of the natural. But the word 'supernatural' is, in real- 
ity, only concerned with the partial and conventional use of ' nature,' as a 
term under which we sum up all that constitutes this present and visible 
system of things. 

2 It is this point of arrest which is reached and revealed by the process of 
Evolution under the pressure of Natural Selection. 



14 The Religio?i of the Incarnation. 

open to a development of which it is impossible for us to fix the 
limits. For this living recognition itself advances in its capacity to 
see and understand. Every act by which it recognizes the Giver in 
the gifts, heightens and intensifies its power to recognize Him ; and 
every increase of its power to recognize Him increases also its 
capacity to receive ; and this increase will again react on the facul- 
ties of recognition. A vision opens out of spiritual growth, in 
which every step forward made through incoming grace, makes a 
new step possible, finds a fresh grace ever waiting to crown its 
latest gift with ever new endowment. The sonship that is at work 
underground in man, below the level of consciousness, at the hid- 
den base of faith, is one that holds in it capacities which can only 
be evoked under the appeals of a living and voluntary faith. Faith 
is the discovery of an inherent sonship, which, though already 
sealed to it, already in action, nevertheless cannot but withhold 
its more rich and splendid energies until this discovery is made ; 
and which discloses them only according to the progressive clear- 
ness and force with which the process of discovery advances. The- 
history of faith is the history of this gradual disclosure, this 
growing capacity to recognize and receive, until the rudimen- 
tary omen of God's fatherhood in the rudest savage, who draws 
by clumsy fetich or weird incantation, upon a power outside him- 
self, closes its long story in the absolute recognition, the perfect 
and entire receptivity, of that Son of man who can do nothing 
of Himself ' but what He seeth the Father do/ and for that very 
reason can do everything ; for whatsoever l the Father doeth, the 
Son doeth also.' 

Faith, then, is not only the recognition by man of the secret 
source of his being, but it is itself, also, the condition under which 
the powers, that issue from that source, make their arrival within 
him. The sonship, already germinal, completes itself, realizes 
itself in man, through his faith. Not only is the unconscious 
human nature held by attachment to the Father who feeds it with 
hidden succors, but faith is, itself, the power by which the con- 
scious life attaches itself to God ; it is an apprehensive motion of 
the living spirit, by which it intensifies its touch on God ; it is an 
instinct of surrender, by which it gives itself to the fuller handling 
of God : it is an affection of the will, by which it presses up against 
God, and drinks in divine vitality with quickened receptivity. 1 

What then will be its characteristics? We have only to keep 
close to the conception of sonship, and we shall understand them 

1 Faith is spoken of, here and elsewhere, in its perfect and true form, 
as if unthwarted by the misdirection and hurt of sin. 



I. Faith. 15 

well enough. Faith is the attitude, the temper, of a son towards 
a father. That is a relationship that we all can understand for 
ourselves. We know it, in spite of all the base and cruel corrup- 
tions under which, in the homes of man, its beauty lies disfigured. 
Still, beneath disguises, we catch sight, in rare and happy condi- 
tions, of that beautiful intimacy which can spring up between a 
son and a father, where love is one with reverence, and duty ful- 
fils itself in joy. Such a sonship is like a spiritual instinct, which 
renders intelligible to the son every mood and gesture of the 
father. His very blood moves in rhythm to the father's motives. 
His soul hangs, for guidance, on the father's eyes : to him, each 
motive of the father justifies itself as a satisfying inspiration. The 
father's will is felt deliriously encompassing him about ; enclosed 
within it, his own will works, glad and free in its fortifying obedi- 
ence. Such a relationship as this needs no justifying sanction 
beyond itself; it is its own sanction, its own authority, its own 
justification. ' He is my father : ' that is a sufficient reason for all 
this sympathetic response to another's desire. ' I am his son : * 
that is the final premise in which all argument comes to a close. 
The willing surrender of the heart is the witness to a fact which 
is beyond argument, which accepts no denial, yet which is no 
tyrannous fate, but is a living and animating bond of blood, which 
it is a joy to recognize, and an inspiration to confess. 

It is in such a spirit of sonship that faith reveals and realizes 
itself. Faith is that temper of sympathetic and immediate re- 
sponse to Another's will which belongs to a recognized relationship 
of vital communion. It is the spirit of confident surrender, which 
can only be justified by an inner identification of life. Its primary 
note, therefore, will be trust, — that trust of Another, which needs 
no ulterior grounds on which to base itself, beyond what is in- 
volved in the inherent law of this life. Faith will ever discover, 
when its reasons for action, or belief, are traced to their last source, 
that it arrives at a point where its only and all-sufficient plea will 
be ' God is my Father : I am His child.' That relationship is its 
root ; on the top of that relationship faith works ; as a witness to 
that relationship, it puts forth all the spiritual temper which, of 
necessity, follows on this intimacy of contact. 

And, here, we find ourselves in the presence of the law by which 
faith claims to be universal. Unless this inner relationship be a 
fact, faith could not account for itself : but if it be a fact, it must 
constitute a fixed and necessary demand upon all men. All are, 
equally, t children of God ; ' and the answer to the question, ' Why 
should I believe ? ' must be, forever and for all, valid : ' Because 



1 6 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

you are a child of God.' Faith is nothing but the spiritual temper 
and attitude, which belong, inherently, to such a fact. No one 
can escape from such a claim : for his existence constitutes the 
claim. If he be a child, it must be demanded of him, that he 
should display the characteristics of his childhood : the father 
must, of necessity, be concerned with the question of his own 
recognition by his son. Our manhood lies in this essential son- 
ship : and, if so, then to be without faith, without the conscious 
realization of the sonship, is to be without the fulness of a man's 
proper nature. It is to be inhuman : to be curtailed of the natural 
development: to be maimed and thwarted. It means that the 
vital outcome of the inner verity has been arrested ; that the sen- 
sitive perceptions have been blunted and stunted ; that the sonship 
in us has, somehow, lost touch with its true fatherhood. 

We learn at once, as we consider this, the interpretation of that 
two-sided character, which surprises us in God's dealings with 
men ; i. e., the imperative rigor of His stated requirements, coupled 
with His wide and patient tolerance, in actual fact. 

As a Father of all, He cannot, conceivably, be satisfied with 
anything short of complete recognition by His children. He 
must look for faith ; He must require it of them all ; He must 
leave no means untried by which to secure it ; He must seek to 
win it at all costs ; His love is inevitably and cruelly hindered, 
unless He can obtain it : and when He obtains it, He must pas- 
sionately desire to establish, evoke, develop, perfect it : for each 
rise in faith is a rise in capacities of intercourse, of intimacy, 
between Father and son. We see how strenuous and zealous 
will be His efforts to build up faith in men ; we understand how 
urgent, and pressing, and alarming will become His entreaties, 
His warnings, His menaces, His appeals, if faith is allowed to 
slide or fail. Loss of faith means a shattered home, a ruptured 
intimacy, a sundered love ; it means that a Father must look on 
while the very nature He has made in His image shrivels and 
shrinks, and all hope of growth, of advancing familiarity, of 
increasing joy, of assured sympathy, is cut down and blighted. 
We all know the bitterness of a breach which scatters a family 
into fragments ; and that is but a faint shadow of all which the 
great Father sees to be involved in the broken contact between 
Himself and His son. What standard have we by which to sound 
the abyss of divine disappointment, as God waits ready with gift 
upon gift of endless grace which He will pour out upon the child 
of His love, as the endless years open out new wonders of advan- 
cing intimacy ; and lo ! the channel by which alone the gifts can 



I. Faith. 17 

reach him, is choked and closed ? Faith is the son's receptivity ; 
it is that temper of trust, which makes the entry of succors pos- 
sible ; it is the medium of response ; it is the attitude of adherence 
to the Father, by virtue of which communications can pass. If faith 
goes, all further action of God upon the soul, all fresh arrival of 
power, is made impossible. The channel of intercourse is blocked. 

The demand, then, for faith by God is bound to be exacting, 
and urgent, and universal. But, then, this demand holds in 
reserve a ground of hope, of patience, of tolerance, of charity, 
which we can in no single instance venture to limit. For the 
faith, which it rigorously asks for, reposes, as we see, on an inner 
and essential relationship, already existent, which knits man to his 
God. Not even the Fall, with all its consequent accumulations of 
sin, can avail to wholly undo this primitive condition of existence. 
The fatherhood of God still sustains its erring children ; the 
divine image is blurred, but not blotted out. Still, at the close of 
the long days, our Lord can speak to the wondering men who 
flock about Him, of One Who is even now their Father in heaven. 
This objective and imperishable relationship, the underlying ground 
of all our being, is the pre-supposition of all faith, without which 
it would itself be impossible. And, this being so, God can afford 
to wait very long for faith to show itself. So long as its primary 
condition is there, there is always hope. The stringent demand is 
not inspired by the mind of a lawgiver, nor pressed home with 
the austerity of a judge ; it expresses the hunger of a father's 
heart to win the confidence and to evoke the capacities of the 
children of its love. Such a hunger is, indeed, more rigorous and 
exact than the letter of any law : it aspires after a more accurate 
correspondence ; it is sensitive to more delicate distinctions : but, 
nevertheless, it holds, in its fatherliness, far wider capacities of 
toleration than lawgiver or judge. That same heart of the father, 
which in its hunger of love is so exacting, will, out of the same 
hunger, never despair, and never forsake : it will never cease from 
the pursuit of that responsive trust which it desires ; it will make 
allowances, it will permit delays, it will weave excuses, it will 
endure rebuffs, it will condescend to persuasion, it will forget all 
provocations, it will wait, it will plead, it will repeat its pleas, it will 
take no refusal, it will overleap all obstacles, it will run risks, it will 
endlessly and untiringly forgive, if only, at the last, the stubborn 
child-heart yield, and the tender response of faith be won. 

Here, then, we seem to see why the nature of faith allows for 
two points which surprise us in God's dealings, as if with a contra- 
diction. On the one hand, we hear Him, through prophet and 

2 



1 8 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

priest, insisting, with severe precision, on the necessity of a right 
and accurate faith. On the other, we cannot but recognize, in the 
open area of actual life, the evidences of a wide and almost bound- 
less toleration. Again and again it must have seemed to us that 
the Church and the world gave, thus, antithetical evidence of 
God's character. Yet, in truth, both speak the voice of one and 
the same God, Who, in His undivided love, both passionately 
seeks for the delicate and direct response of an accurate faith ; 
and also, in order not to lose this final joy, ' surTereth long, and is 
kind, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, en- 
clu'reth all things.' Yes ; has even to endure that men should pit 
His toleration against His love, and should argue that, because He 
will wait so long and quietly for the fruit that He desires to reap, 
therefore He does not desire the fruit. In reality, the degree of 
the toleration, with which God will patiently wait for the fruits of 
faith, is the measure of the extremity of His desire for it. Just 
because He wants it so much, He waits so long. 

III. If faith, then, be the witness and the exercise of our sonship 
in God, we can recognize at once the place it will hold among 
the other powers and capacities of our nature. We are so un- 
fortunately apt to rank it as one among many faculties, and then 
to find ourselves engaged in agitating controversies concerning its 
limits and its claims. We have to secure for it, against the rest, a 
field for free dominion ; and that field is hard to define ; and rival 
powers beset it ; and there are raids and skirmishes on every fron- 
tier ; and reason is ever making violent incursions on the one side, 
and feeling is actively besieging it on the other ; and the scientific 
frontiers, which we are ever on the point of fixing, shift, and 
change, and vanish, as soon as we determine them ; and the 
whole force of Christian apologetics is spent in aimless and barren 
border-warfare. 

But if what we have been saying be true, the whole trouble turns 
on a mistake. Faith is not to be ranked by the side of the other 
faculties in a federation of rival powers, but is behind them all-. It 
goes back to a deeper root ; it springs from a more primitive and 
radical act of the central self than they. It belongs to that ori- 
ginal spot of our being, where it adheres in God, and draws on 
divine resources. Out from that spot our powers divide, radiating 
into separate gifts, — will, memory, feeling, reason, imagination, 
affection ; but all of them are but varying expressions of that 
essential sonship which is their base. And all, therefore, run 
back into that home where faith abides, and works, and rises, and 
expands. At the root of all our capacities lies our sonship ; at the 



I. Faith. * 19 

root of all our conscious life lies faith, the witness of our sonship. 
By adherence in God we put out our gifts, we exercise our func- 
tions, we develop our faculties ; and faith, therefore, far from being 
their rival, whom they are interested in suspecting, and curbing, 
and confining within its limits, is the secret spring of their force, 
and the inspiration of their growth and the assurance of their 
success. All our knowledge, for instance, relies upon our son- 
ship ; it starts with an act of faith. 1 We throw ourselves, with 
the confidence of children, upon an external world, which offers 
itself to our vision, to our touch, to our review, to our calcu- 
lation, to our handling, to our use. Who can assure us of 
its reality, of its truth ? We must measure it by those faculties 
under the manipulation of which it falls. But how can the faculties 
guarantee to us their own accuracy? How can we justify an 
extension of our own inner necessities to the world of outward 
things? How can we attribute to nature that rational and causa- 
tive existence which we find ourselves forced to assume in it? 
Our justification, our confidence, — all issue, in the last resort, 
from our sonship. Our powers have, in them, some likeness to 
those of God. If He be our Father, if we be made in His image, 
then, in our measure, we can rely upon it that we close with Nature 
in its reality ; that our touch, our sight, our reason, have some 
hold on the actual life of things ; that we see and know in some 
such manner, after our degree, as God Himself sees and knows. 
In unhesitating reliance upon our true sonship, we sally out and 
deal with the world ; we act upon the sure conviction that we are 
not altogether outside the secret of objective existence. We re- 
fuse absolutely to doubt, or go behind the reports made to us by 
feeling, by memory, by thought. If once we are clear as to what 
the report is, we rest on it ; we ask for no power to stand (as it 
were) outside our own experience, our own knowledge, so as to 
assure ourselves of their veracity. We are certain that our Father 
cannot have misguided us ; that we are within His influence • that 
we are in modified possession of His truth ; that our capacities 
reflect His mind. We could not have so confidently recognized, 
understood, and handled the world if it had been wholly foreign 
to us. As it is, we lay instinctive hold upon it; we take spon- 
taneous possession ; we exert authority upon it ; we feel our 
inherent right over it ; we are at home in it ; we move freely 
about it, as children in a father's house. Acting in this faith, all 
our capacities justify themselves to us ; they respond to our reli- 
ance upon them ; they develop into ever-advancing strength under 

1 Cf. pp. 87, 88. 



20 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

the motions of this trust; they form a continual and increasing 
witness to the verity of that sonship in which we have believed. 

Faith, then, belongs to our entire body of activities. We live 
by faith. By faith, under the inspiration of faith, we put out our 
life, we set to work, we exercise faculties, we close with our oppor- 
tunities, we have confidence in our environment, we respond to 
calls, we handle critical emergencies, we send out far abroad our 
experimental intelligence, we discover, we accumulate experiences, 
we build, and plant, and develop. An elemental act of faith lies 
at the root of all this advance ; and every motion that we make, 
demands a renewal of that primitive venture. In all secular pro- 
gress * we walk by faith.' Every step revives the demand. Just as 
the earth, if it necessitates the idea of a primal creation, requires, 
by exactly the same necessity, an incessant renewal of that first 
creative act, so our life, if it required faith to start it, requires faith 
every moment to sustain it. Our faculties never arrive at a use 
which is self-dependent and self-originated, as if they could grow 
beyond the tentative conditions of their earliest essays. They ori- 
ginate in a venturous experiment ; and, however long and however 
complicated that experiment become, it retains its original charac- 
ter ; it remains experimental to the end. The results, no doubt, 
justify the venture made ; but, then, the first venture involved such 
immense assumptions that no results reached can ever complete its 
justification, and so remove its tentative nature. For, by assuming a 
real correspondence between our faculties and the world with which 
they deal, it assumed that such a correspondence would never fail 
us ; would be capable of infinite verification ; would prove adequate 
to all possible experiences ; would receive indefinite and progressive 
extension. No verifications ever reached can, then, exhaust the 
faith of that primitive venture ; they can only serve to exhibit to 
it how far more was contained within that venture than it could 
ever have conceived. New knowledge, new experience, far from 
expunging the elements of faith, make ever fresh demands upon 
it ; they constitute perpetual appeals to it to enlarge its trust, to 
expand its original audacity. And yet the very vastness of those 
demands serves to obscure and conceal their true character. This 
is the key to much of our present bewilderment. The worlds of 
knowledge and of action have assumed such huge proportions, 
have accumulated such immense and complicated resources, have 
gained such supreme confidence in their own stability, have pushed 
forward their successes with such startling power and rapidity, that 
we have lost count of their primal assumption. In amazement at 
their stupendous range, we are overawed ; we dare not challenge 






I. Faith. 2 1 

them with their hypothetical origin, or remind them that their en- 
tire and wonderful structure is but an empty and hollow dream, 
unless they are prepared to place their uttermost trust in an "un- 
verified act of faith. Given that trust which relies on the reality 
of the bond which holds between our inner faculties and the outer 
world, then all this marvellous vision is rooted on a rock, has va- 
lidity and substance. Withdraw that spiritual trust in our sonship, 
and all this fairy-world, won for us by science and experience, 

" The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
The solemn temples, the great globe itself, 
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve 
And, like an insubstantial pageant faded, 
Leave not a rack behind." 

Our secular and scientific life is an immense experiment in faith, 
— an experiment which verifies itself by success, but which justifies 
itself only if it remembers to attribute all its success to the reality 
of that hidden relationship to God which is the key to all its capa- 
cities, the justification of all its confidence, and the security of all 
its advance. 

Such a remembrance is not easy for it : for the exercise of the 
capacities is instinctive and spontaneous, and it requires an effort 
of reflection to question the validity of such exercise. And such 
an effort seems tiresome and impertinent in the heat of successful 
progress, in the thick of crowding conquests. The practical man is 
apt to give an irritated stamp on the ground, which to him feels 
so solid, and to deem this a sufficient answer to the importu- 
nate inquiry how he knows that he has any substantial world to 
know and to handle. For faith lies behind our secular life, secreted 
within it : and the secular life, therefore, can go on as if no faith 
was wanted ; it need not trouble its head with perplexing questions, 
whether its base be verifiable by the same standards and measures 
as its superstructure. Its own practical activity is complete and 
free, whether it discover its hidden principle or not ; just as M. 
t Jourdain's conversation was complete and free, long before he dis- 
S covered that he was talking prose. We have to stand outside our 
} secular life and reflect on it to disclose its true spring. The 
appeal to faith here is indirect. 

But, in religion, this hidden activity is evoked by a direct appeal ; 
it is unearthed ; it is summoned to come forward on its own account. 
God demands of this secret and innermost vitality that it should no 
longer lie incased within the other capacities, but that it should 
throw off its sheltering covers and should emerge into positive 



22 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

action, and should disclose its peculiar and native character. 
God the Father calls faith out of its dim background into the 
front of the scene. He does this under the pressure of invoca- 
tions, which address their appeals through, and by means of, the 
secular and visible material, within and behind which He is ever at 
work. This had, indeed, always told of His invisible and eternal 
Godhead : but it did so indirectly, by requiring Him as its con- 
stant presupposition and base. Now, it is so used as to bring 
God into direct and positive evidence by means of acts, which 
bring forward the energies of His immediate fatherhood. All the 
growth of Eden had always testified to the existence and the name 
of God ; but a new stage was reached when Pie was felt moving, 
in evening hours, amid the trees of the garden. And as the 
Father presses forward out of His silent background, so the secret 
sonship in man emerges out of its deep recesses in positive 
response, using its own secular faculties by which to carry itself 
forward into evidence and action. This definite and direct con- 
tact between the God Who is the hidden source of all life, and 
the faith which is the hidden spring of all human activity ; this 
disclosure by the Father, met by this discovery by the son, this 
is Religion ; and the history of Religion is the story of its slow 
and gradual advance in sanity and clearness, until it culminates 
in that special disclosure which we call Revelation ; which, again, 
crowns itself in that Revelation of the Father through the Son, 
in which the disclosure of God to man and the discovery by 
man of God are made absolute in Him Who is one with the 
Father, knowing all that the Father does, making known all 
that the Father is. 

Now here we have reached a parting of ways. For we have 
touched the point at which the distinctions start out between 
what is secular and what is sacred ; between virtue and godliness ; 
between the world and the Church. If ' Religion ' means this 
coming forward into the foreground of that which is the univer- 
sal background of all existence, then we cut ourselves free from 
the perplexity which benumbs us when we hear of the ' Gospel of 
the Secular Life ; ' of the ' Religion of Humanity ; ' of doctors and 
scientific professors being ' Ministers of Religion ; ' of the ' Natural 
Religion ' which is contained within the borders of science with its 
sense of wonder, or of art with its vision of beauty. All this is so 
obviously true in one sense that it sinks to the level of an amiable 
commonplace ; but if this be the sense intended, why is all this 
emphasis laid upon it? Yet if more than this is meant, we are 
caught in a juggling maze of words, and are losing hold on vital 



I. Faith. 23 

distinctions, and feel ourselves to be rapidly collapsing into the 
condition of the unhappy Ninevites, who knew not their right 
hands from their left. 

The word ' Religion,' after all, has a meaning : and we do not 
get forward by laboring to disguise from ourselves this awkward 
fact. This positive meaning allows everything that can be asked 
in the way of sanctity and worth, for nature and the natural life. 
All of it is God-given, God-inspired, God-directed ; all of it is holy. 
But the fact of this being so is one thing : the recogiiition of it is 
another ; and it is this recognition of God in things which is the 
core and essence of religion. Natural life is the life in God, which 
has not yet arrived at this recognition : it is not yet, as such, reli- 
gious. The sacred and supernatural office of man is to press 
through his own natural environment, to force his spirit through 
the thick jungle of his manifold activities and capacities, to shake 
himself free from the encompassing complexities, to step out clear 
and loose from all entanglement, to find himself, through and 
beyond all his secular experiences, face to face with a God, Who, 
on His side, is forever pushing aside the veil which suggests and 
conceals Him, forever disengaging Himself from the phenomena 
through which He arrives at man's consciousness, forever brushing 
away the confusions, and coming out more and more into the 
open, until, through and past the ' thunder comes a human voice ; ' 
and His eyes burn their way through into man's soul ; and He 
calls the man by his name, and takes him apart, and hides him in 
some high and separate cleft of the rock, far from all the glamour 
and tumult of crowded existence, and holds him close in the hollow 
of His hand as He passes by, and names to him, with clear and 
memorable voice, the ' Name of the Lord, the Lord God, merciful, 
gracious, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving 
iniquity, and Who will by no means clear the guilty.' Here is Re- 
ligion. It is the arrival at the secret ; the discovery by the son of 
a Father, Who is in all His works, yet is distinct from them all, — 
to be recognized, known, spoken with, loved, imitated, worshipped, 
on His own account, and for Himself alone. 

Religion, in this sense, is perfectly distinct from what is secular : 
yet, in making this distinction, it brings no reproach ; it pro- 
nounces nothing common or unclean. It only asks us not to play 
with words ; and it reminds us that, in blurring this radical distinc- 
tion, we are undoing all the work which it has been the aim of 
the religious movement to achieve. For the history of this move- 
ment is the record of the gradual advance man has made in disen- 
tangling ' the Name of God ' from all its manifestations. Religion 



24 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

is the effort to arrive at that Name, in its separable identity, in its 
personal and distinct significance. It is the fulfilment of the un- 
ceasing cry, ' Tell me Thy name ! ' In religion we are engaged in 
the age-long task of lifting the Name, clear and high, above the 
clang and roar of its works, that through and by means of all that 
He is, we may pierce through to the very God of gods, and may 
close with Him in the blessed solitude of a love which knits heart 
to heart and spirit to spirit, without any withholding interval, with 
no veil to hinder or intervene. 

The growth of faith, then, means the gradual increase of this 
personal contact, this spiritual intimacy between Father and son. 
To achieve this increasing apprehension of the Father's character 
and love, faith uses, as instruments and as channels, all its natural 
faculties, by which to bring itself forward into action, and through 
which to receive the communications, which arrive at it from the 
heart and will of Him, Who, on His side, uses all natural opportu- 
nities as the material of a speech, which is ever, as man's ear be- 
comes sensitive and alert, growing more articulate, and positive, 
and personal. 

The entire human nature — imagination, reason, feeling, desire 
— becomes to faith a vehicle of intercourse, a mediating aid in 
its friendship with God. But faith itself lies deeper than all the 
capacities of which it makes use : it is, itself, the primal act of the 
elemental self, there at the root of life, where the being is yet 
whole and entire, a single personal individuality, unbroken and 
undivided. Faith, which is the germinal act of our love for God, 
is an act of the whole self, there where it is one, before it has 
parted off into what we can roughly describe as separate and dis- 
tinguishable faculties. It therefore uses, not one or other of the 
faculties, but all ; and in a sense it uses them all at once, just as 
any complete motion of will, or of love, acts with all the united 
force of many combined faculties. A perfect act of love would 
combine, into a single movement, the entire sum of faculties, just 
because it proceeds from that basal self, which is the substance 
and unity of them all. So with faith. Faith, the act of a willing 
adhesion to God the Father, proceeds from a source deeper than 
the point at which faculties divide. 

And this has a most vital bearing on the question of faith's 
evidences. It is here we touch on the crucial characteristic 
which determines all our logical and argumentative position. 

For, if a movement of faith springs from a source anterior to 
the distinct division of faculties, then no one faculty can adequately 
account for the resultant action. Each faculty, in its separate 



I. Faith. 25 

stage, can account for one element, for one factor, which contri- 
buted to the result; and that element, that factor, may be of 
greater or less importance, according to the rank of the faculty in 
the entire self. But, if the movement of faith has also included 
and involved many other elements which appear, when analyzed 
out, in the domains of the other faculties ; then the account which 
each separate faculty can give of the whole act, can never be 
more than partial. Its evidence must be incomplete. If the 
central self has gathered its momentum from many channels, it is 
obvious that the amount contributed by any one channel will be 
unable to justify the force exerted, or to explain the event that 
followed. If we track home each faculty employed to this central 
spring of energy, we shall see that each points to the result, con- 
tributes to it, suggests it ; but the result will always be more than 
the evidence, so collected, can warrant. 

This limitation, which we may allow about other faculties, is apt 
to become a stumbling-block when we apply it to the high gift of 
reason. Reason, somehow, seems to us to rise into some supreme 
and independent throne ; it reviews the other faculties ; and is, 
therefore, free from their limitations. We fear to hint that it has 
any lord over it. How can we assume such a lordship without 
dubbing ourselves irrational obscurantists, who in folly try to stamp 
out the light ? 

But we are not, in reality, dreaming of limiting reason by any 
limitations except those which it makes for itself. We are not 
violently attempting to make reason stop short at any point, where 
it conld go on. We are only asking, Is there any point at which 
it stops of itself, and cannot go farther? We propose to use 
reason right out, to press it to its utmost limit, to spur it to put 
forth all its powers ; and we assert that, so doing, reason will, at 
last, reveal its inability to get right to the end, to carry clear home. 
And why? Because the self is not only rational, but something 
more : it combines, with its unbroken, central individuality, other 
elements besides reason ; and therefore, of sheer necessity, when- 
ever that central self puts out an elemental act in which the in- 
tegral spring of personal energy takes part, — such as an act of 
will, or love, or faith, — then, reason can be but one factor, but 
one element, however important, in that issuing act : and if so, 
then it can give but a partial account of it ; its own contribution 
cannot wholly explain, or justify the result. In Bishop Butler's 
language, the utmost that reason can do is to make it 'very 
probable.' 

The real root-question in this time-worn controversy is just this : 



26 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

Is, or is not, reason the most primal and elemental act of the 
integral personality? If it is, then, of course, it regulates and de- 
termines all subordinate acts. Everything must finally submit to 
its arbitration ; for everything, if tracked back far enough, must 
terminate in an act of reason. 

But if, as Christianity asserts, the ultimate and elemental self 
be a moral will, that can believe, and love, then, though this self 
contains in it reason, it also goes back behind reason. Reason is 
indeed one of its essential elements, but it is not its entire essence, 
for this includes within itself, that which appears as feeling, and 
desire, and imagination, and choice, and passion, as well as that 
which shows itself as reason. When, therefore, the self puts out 
its primitive power, it will do actions which satisfy reason, indeed, 
but which reason cannot exhaustively analyze, or interpret, since 
the entire force of reason, if it were all brought into action, would 
still be only a partial contribution to the effect. 

As a fact, we all of us are perfectly familiar with this limitation, 
in affairs of affection and friendship. We never have here that 
paralyzing awe of reason which haunts us in matters of religion. 
We never allow ourselves to be bullied into submission to its 
supremacy. We should laugh at it, if it attempted to dictate to 
us, or to account for all our motives. Not that we are at war 
with it, or are shirking it, or are afraid of it. We can have 
affections and friendships, which have every possible justification 
which reason can offer. Every conceivable expediency can unite 
to authorize and approve them. Every interest may be served by 
them. They may stand every test which a cool common-sense, 
or a calm impartial judgment, or an acute calculation of conse- 
quences can apply to them. They may be the very embodiment 
of reason. And yet, by no amount of calculated expediencies, by 
no pressure of rational considerations, could we dream, for one 
moment, that our friendship was accounted for. If ever it could 
trace its origin to these motives, it would cease to be what we 
thought it. The discovery would destroy it. All possible con- 
siderations and calculations might have been present, and yet they 
would be utterly powerless to create in us the love. And the love, 
however gladly it may recognize the approving considerations, 
would repudiate, with amazement and with laughter, any presump- 
tion on their part to say, ' This is why you love.' 

It is the same with all primal acts of heroism. They may be 
absolutely rational : yet, they would cease to be heroic, they would 
never be done, if they did not call upon a force, which, indeed, 
may determine its direction by reason, but which uses quite other 



I. Fahh. 27 

motives to induce itself to act. Utilitarianism, which attempts to 
account for such heroic momentum by purely rational considera- 
tions, finds itself reduced to shifts which all those can see through, 
who refuse to be juggled out of their own experiences. It is the 
same with all the higher forms of moral energy. All of them go 
beyond their evidences. They all lift the rational motives, which 
suggest and determine the direction of their activity, by an impul- 
sive force, which has in it the power of initiative, of origination. 
Every high act of will is a new creation. As the gunpowder 
sleeps until the spark alights upon it, so the directions of reason 
remain below the level of action until the jet of a living will fuses 
its fire with their material. The act which results may, indeed, 
be capable of complete interpretation on reasonable grounds : it 
may be able to show reasons which account for every fragment of 
it : yet, still, the living force which drew together and combined 
all those separate reasons into a single resultant act, has a creative 
and original character. The series of reasons, however complete, 
cannot account for the result, for they cannot possibly account for 
their own combination : and without this combination of their 
momentum the result would not be there. 

It is well to recall briefly this character of the moral will, the 
affections, the love of man. For these are faith's nearest and 
dearest allies. It is here in these elemental motions that faith 
finds its closest parallel. It is something very like an act of will, 
a movement of love, an heroic and chivalrous moral venture. 
And whenever we desire to understand its relations to reason, we 
must persistently recall the attitude towards reason taken by these 
fundamental forms of energy ; only remembering that faith is yet 
more elemental, yet more completely the act of the central inte- 
gral self, even than these. Where they leave reason behind, it 
will do so yet further. Where they call upon something deeper 
and more primitive than reason, it will do the same, and yet more 
triumphantly. It is not that either it or they are without reason ; 
or that they stand outside reason, consulting it so far as they 
choose, and then dropping it ; it is not that reason may not be 
found in every corner and fragment of their activity, pervading, 
coloring, restraining, limiting, directing, justifying it : but simply that 
what we call the rational self is not only rational, but also some- 
thing more ; that, if analyzed out, the reason will not appear as 
the root and core of the man, but rather as an element inhering in 
a yet more central base ; and that whenever the energy of vital 
action is put out, we are driven to look through and beyond reason, 
if we would unearth the source whence the act springs. 



28 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

The relation, then, of reason to faith is not strange, or forced, 
or unfamiliar to us, if it is much the same as its relation to the 
affections, or to moral acts and intuitions. We know what to 
expect, what part it ought to play in such a case. As in a case of 
heroic moral daring, or high affection, so, in a matter of faith, we 
shall expect that reason, with its arguments and. its evidences, will 
play all round and about it, will go before it, discussing the path 
to follow, will follow after it, unravelling the secret forces at work 
in it \ will watch, and analyze, and learn, and warn ; will recon- 
noitre, and examine, and survey, and discover ; will justify, inter- 
pret, defend, assist. But yet we shall expect, also, that the act of 
faith will do more than all the arguments can anticipate ; that it 
will hold itself free from them all ; that it will appeal, not to them, 
but to its own inherent force, for the final decision ; that it will 
move by instinct, by spontaneity, by inspiration ; that it will rush 
past all evidences, in some great stride ; that it will brush through 
scruples that cannot be gainsaid, and obstacles that cannot be got 
over ; that it will surprise, that it will outdo, that it will create ; 
that it will bring novel forces into play, invisible, unaccountable, 
incalculable ; that it will fly, when reason walks ; that it will laugh, 
when reason trembles ; that it will over-leap barriers which reason 
deems final. As with love, so with faith, it will take in all evi- 
dences, it will listen to all proofs ; but when they have done their 
utmost, it has yet got to begin ; it itself, after all its calculations, 
must make the actual spring, which is the decision. Out of itself, 
it draws its strength ; out of itself it makes its effort ; by being 
what it is, it sees what it sees, it does what it does. It uses the 
evidence ; but uses it to leap from, to go farther. Its motives, 
advances, efforts, issue from within itself. Just as the lover's final 
answer to the question, ' Why did you do that ? ' must be, ' Because 
I loved ; ' so the final answer of the believer, in explanation of an 
act, can never be wrung out of the reasonable grounds for so acting : 
it must always be, ' Because I believed.' Just as man first acts and 
speaks, and reason, following behind, can at last discover that his 
actions were all consecutive, and that his language has a perfect 
grammar ; so faith has always to make its venture, prompted and 
inspired from within, and only long afterwards can it expect to 
learn that if it has been true to itself, to its proper promptings, 
then its action can, by slow and plodding reason, be thoroughly 
interpreted and justified. Faith is, above all things, anticipatory, 
The sonship, within, anticipates what the Father has in store for 
it : by means of affection, by rapid instincts of love, it assumes what 
it cannot yet verify, it foretells the secrets that lie hidden within the 



I. Faith. 29 

Father's eyes. So anticipating, it makes its venture, — a venture 
which love alone can understand and justify, though the faithful- 
ness of the eternal and supreme Father ensures that the anticipa- 
tion shall receive its full verification. 

If this be the relation of faith to reason, we see the explanation 
of what seems, at first sight, to the philosopher to be the most irri- 
tating and hypocritical characteristic of faith. It is always shifting 
its intellectual defences. It adopts this or that fashion of philoso- 
phical apology ; and then, when this is shattered by some novel j 
scientific generalization, faith, probably after a passionate struggle 
to retain the old position, suddenly and gayly abandons it, and 
takes up with the new formula just as if nothing had happened : 
it discovers that the new formula is admirably adapted for its pur- 
poses, and is, in fact, just what it always meant, only it has unfor- 
tunately omitted to mention it. So it goes on, again and again ; 
and no wonder that the philosophers growl at those humbugs, the 
clergy ! 

But they are criticising faith as if it were a theory, as if knowl- 
edge were its province, while in truth the seat of faith lies back 
behind the region of knowledge. Its radical acts and motives are 
independent of any particular condition of thought or science ; 
they are deeper recessed ; they exist in their own right, and under 
their own conditions. True, they may not be able to express 
themselves, to get their energies forward, to set themselves free, 
to manifest themselves, except through the mediation of knowl- 
edge, — through the instruments and channels which the science 
of the day provides them. But this does not confuse their inhe- 
rent and distinct character. They never identify themselves with 
the tools they use. They sit quite loose to the particular state of 
thought, the formula, the terms, through which they make their 
way out into action. And, moreover, since the acts of faith are 
more radical than those of reason, and since they belong to the 
entire man acting in his integrity, they therefore of necessity an- 
ticipate, in their degree, all that the man by slow development, by 
the patient industry of reasoning, will laboriously disclose. Lying 
deeper than all knowledge, they hold in them the condition under 
which all knowledge will be arrived at. They constitute the 
activity which ought to be at the background of all our reasoning. 
No particular or partial state of knowledge can exhaust their sig- 
nificance. Each step knowledge makes does but illustrate, in 
some new fashion, the relation of all knowledge to faith, — does 
but elucidate the characteristics of that primal sonship. In each 
fresh discovery or generalization, faith finds a new instrument for 



30 TJie Re!igio)i of the Incarnation. 

expressing its old convictions ; it is taught to see the weak points, 
the imperfections of its former expressions ; it understands where 
they hold good, and where they failed ; it gets out more of itself 
than ever before, through the new channels opened to it ; it dis- 
covers more of its own character by finding better modes in which 
to manifest it. It does but half know itself, so long as its expres- 
sion is encumbered. 

The advance of secular knowledge, then, is for faith an acquired 
gain, for by it, it knows itself better; it sees more of what was 
involved in its vital convictions. It has a struggle, no doubt, in 
dropping off the expressions that have grown familiar to it, and in 
detecting the fresh insight into its own nature which it can win by 
the new terminology : but when once it has mastered the terms, 
new lights break out upon it, new suggestions flash, new capacities 
disclose themselves. It has won a new tool : when it has become 
familiarized with the use of it, it can do great and unexpected 
things with it. 

But, for all that, it is but a new tool, worked by the old con- 
victions ; they have not changed, any more than love changes, 
though the slow development of married life may carry the lovers 
into unknown experiences, in foreign lands, under changed skies. 
The two, if they be faithful, learn far more of what the love they 
plighted means, as each sweeping revolution carries them hither 
and thither, than ever they understood on the wedding-day ; yet it 
is ever the old love then pledged, which they hold fast to the end. 
Its identity is emphasized by the changes. So with faith. It may 
absorb its energies in the joy of wielding the particular instrument 
with which, at any one moment, science supplies it. But it will 
never the least fear to drop it, so soon as the advancing skill and 
the pushing minds of men have elaborated for it some yet more 
delicate and subtle tool, wherewith to give free play to its native 
vitalities. 

For faith is moved by but one solitary passion, — the hope of 
cleaving, closer and ever closer, to the being of God. It is, itself, 
nothing but this act of personal adherence, of personal cohesion ; 
and all else is, for it, material that can be subdued to this single 
service. Each bettering of knowledge intensifies the possibilities 
of this cohesion ; and, for that, it is welcomed. It opens out 
fresh aspects of the good Father ; it uncovers new treasures of His 
wisdom : therefore, for faith, it is an ever-mounting ladder, by 
which it draws nearer and nearer, spirit to spirit, heart to heart. 
No idle or indifferent matter this ; and right knowledge, therefore, 
is for faith a serious and pressing need. And, moreover, faith is 



i. Fait i : 

pledged to use aU possible guidance and direction in making its 
great act of self-surrender to God. And it is the peculiar office 
of reason, and of the rational conscience, to guard it from any 
distorted and unworthy venture. Faith has to make its leap ; but 
to make it exacdy in that direction, and in no other, where reason 
points the way. It is bound therefore to use all its intelligent 
resources : it may not fall below the level of its highest reason 
without the risk of sinking to a superstition. This is the radical 
difference between what we here claim, and that which a super- 
stition demands of us. A superstition asks faith to shut its eyes. 
We ask it to open them as wide as it can. We demand this of it 
as a positive duty. It is bound, as an act of the whole man, to 
use every conceivable means and security which knowledge can 
bring it For so alone can it secure itself against the hazards 
which encompass its adventure. It cannot afford to enter on that 
venturous committal of itself less equipped and instructed than it 
was open to it to be. It must put all to use that can better its 
offer of itself to God. 

It is, in this seriousness, that faith is apt to embrace so fast the 
dominant scientific or philosophical creed. It has found, through 
this creed, a new and thrilling insight into God's mind, and it fas- 
tens on this precious gift, and dwells delightedly on it, and spends 
itself in absorbing the peculiar truths which this particular wa 
thinking brings to the front. So that, at last, when the smash 
comes, when the floods break in, when the accumulation of new 
facts outside the old lines necessitates a total reconstruction of the 
intellectual fabric, faith seems to have gone under with the ruined 
scheme to which it had attached itself so firmly. 

. if ever it has implicated its own fate with that of any partic- 
ular form of knowledge, it has been false to itself. It has no more 
right to identify itself with any intellectual situation than it has to 
pin its fortunes to those of any political dynasty. Its eternal task 
lies in rapid readjustment to each fresh situation, which the motion 
of time may disclose to it It has that in it which can apply to all, 
and learn from alL Its identity is not lost because its expressions 
vary and shift : for its identity lies deep in personality ; and per- 
sonality is that which testifies to its own identity by the variety and 
the rapidity of its self-adaptation to the changes of circumstance. 
So with faith. Its older interpretations of itself are not false, be- 
cause the newer situations have called for different manifestations. 
Each situation forces a new aspect to the front. But ever it is 
God and the soul, which recognize each other under every disguise. 
:t is in one fashion, and now in another ; but it is always one 



32 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

unalterable wisdom which is justified, recognized, and loved, by 
those who are her children. 

We will not, then, be the least afraid of the taunt, that we are 
all accepting and delivering from our pulpits that which once 
threw us into anger and dismay. Only let us learn our true lesson ; 
and in our zeal to appreciate the wonders of Evolution, let us 
hold ourselves prepared for the day which is bound to come, when 
again the gathering facts will clamor for a fresh generalization, and 
the wheel will give one more turn, and the new man will catch 
sight of the vision which is preparing, and the new book will 
startle, and the new band of youthful professors will denounce and 
demolish our present heroes, and all the reviews and magazines 
will yelp in chorus at their heels, proclaiming loudly that now, at 
last and forever, the faith which has pledged itself so deeply to the 
obsolete and discredited theory of Evolution is indeed dead and 
done with. Faith will survive that crisis, as it has survived so many 
before ; but it will be something, if it does not drag behind it the 
evil record of passion and blindness, with which it has too often 
disgraced its unwilling passage from truth to truth. 

IV. But here our objections take, perhaps, a new turn alto- 
gether. ' Ah, yes ! ' it will be said, ' faith if it were a simple sur- 
render of the soul to God, a childlike adhesion of the spiritual 
sonship in us to its Father Who is in heaven, might sit loose to all 
formulae, theories, discoveries, in the way described. Faith, if it 
limited itself to this mystical communion, might be beyond the 
scope and criticism of reason. But this is not the least what you 
really ask of us. The faith, for which you practically plead, the 
only form of faith actually open to us, has rashly left these safe con- 
fines ; it has implicated itself with a vast body of facts recorded in 
a book. It has involved itself in intricate statements of dogma. 
How can you claim to be free from the control of logic and criti- 
cism, in things so directly open to logical treatment? This spiri- 
tual faith of yours has mixed itself up with alien matter, with 
historical incidents, with intellectual definitions ; here are things 
of evidence and proof. Here its locks are shorn ; its mystic 
strength is gone. Delilah holds it fast ; it is a prisoner in the 
hands of the Philistines. If you will retreat again back into the 
region of simple spiritual intuitions, and abandon to reason this 
debatable land, how gladly would we follow you ! But that is just 
what you refuse to do.' 

Now, here is the serious moment for us of to-day. It is quite 
true that all would be plain and easy, if we might be allowed to 
make this retreat, if we might limit our claims for the spirit to 



i. Faith, 33 

that simple, childlike intuition which, instinctively, feels after and 
surrenders to the good Father in heaven. But what would that 
retreat mean? It would mean an attempt, desperate and blind, 
to turn back the world's story, to ignore the facts, to overleap the 
distinctions of time and place, to deny experience, to force our- 
selves back into primitive days, to imagine ourselves children again. 
Simple intuitions of God, simple communion with the Father, 
unquestioned, undistracted, — this is the privilege of primitive days, 
when minds are simple, when experience is simple, when society 
is simple. Plain, easy, and direct situations admit of plain, easy, 
and direct handling. But our situation is not plain, easy, or direct. 
Our minds are intricate and complicated ; our story has been a 
long and a difficult one ; our social condition is the perplexed 
deposit of age-long experiences. The faith which is to be ours 
to-day must be a faith of to-day. It cannot remain at the level of 
childhood, when nothing else in us or about us is the least child- 
like. It cannot babble out in pretty baby-language when the situa- 
tion with which it has to deal is terribly earnest, serious, perilous, 
and intense. It must be level with its work ; and its work is com- 
plicated, hard, disciplined : how can it expect to accomplish it 
without effort, without pain, without training, without intricacy? 
The world is old ; human life is old ; and faith is old also. It has 
had many a strange and stormy experience ; it has learned much 
on the way ; it has about it the marks of old troubles ; the care, the 
patience, the completeness of age, have left their stamp upon it. 
It has had a history like everything else ; and it reaches us to-day, in 
a form which that history behind it can alone make intelligible. Four 
thousand years have gone to its making since Abraham first laid 
hold, in a definite and consistent manner, of the faith which is ours 
to-day. All those centuries it has been putting itself together, 
growing, enriching itself, developing, as it faced and measured each 
new issue, each gathering complication, each pressing hazard. 
This long experience has built up faith's history : and, by study of 
that history, we can know why it was that faith could not stand 
still at that point where we should find it so convenient to rest. 
Faith appeals to its own story to justify its career ; it bears about 
that history with it as its explanation, why, and how it has arrived at 
its present condition. That history is its proof how far it has left 
its first childhood behind it, how impossible it is at the end of the 
days to return to the beginning. The history, which constitutes 
our difficulty, is its own answer. For there, in that Bible, lies the 
recorded story of the facts which pressed hard upon the earliest 
intuition of God, and drove it forward, and compelled it to fix itself, 

3 



34 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

and to define itself, and to take a firmer root, and to make for 
itself a secure dwelling-place, and to shape for itself a career. 
The Bible is the apology which our faith carries with it and offers 
as a proof of the necessity which has forced it to go beyond its 
primitive efforts, until it has reached the stage at which we now 
encounter it. It portrays there, before our eyes, how it all began ; 
how there came to this man and to that the simple augury, the 
presage, the spasm of spiritual insight, the flash, the glimpse, 
the intimation ; until there came the man Abraham, in whom it won 
the emphasis, the solidity, the power of a call. < Oh, that we might 
be content to feel, as he, the presence of the Everlasting ! Whv 
not leave us in peace,' we cry, < with the simple faith of Abraham ? ' 
And the answer is plain : < Because it is the nineteenth century after 
Christ, instead of the nineteenth century before/ We are making 
a mistake of dates. Let us turn to our Bible and read. There 
we watch the reasons disclosing themselves why that simple faith 
could not abide in arrest at its first moment ; why it must open 
a new career, with new duties, and new responsibilities, and new 
problems. The seed is sown, but it has to grow ; to make good 
its footing amid the thick of human affairs ; to root itself in the 
soil of human history ; to spread itself out in institutions ; to 
push its dominion ; to widen its range ; to become* a tree that 
will fill the land. Before Abraham, it was but a flying seed, blown 
by the winds; now it is a stable, continuous, masterful growth. 
It must be this, if it is ever to make effective its spiritual asser- 
tions over the increasing intricacy of human affairs. 

What, let us ask, is that life of faith which historically began 
with Abraham ? It is a friendship, an intimacy, between man and 
God, between a son and a father. Such an intimacy cannot be 
idle or stagnant ; it cannot arrest its instinctive development. It 
holds in it infinite possibilities of growth, of increasing familiarity, 
of multiplied communion. And, thus, such a friendship creates 
a story of its own : it has its jars, its frictions, its entangle- 
ments, — alas ! on one side, its lapses, its quarrels, its blunders, 
its misunderstandings ; and then, on the other, its corresponding 
indignations, and withdrawals, and rebukes ; and yet again, its 
reconciliations, its reactions, its pardons, its victories. Ever 
it moves forward on its checkered path ; ever God, the good 
Friend, spends Himself in recovering the intimacy, in renewing it, 
in purging it, in raising it. Its conditions expand ; its demands 
intensify ; its perils deepen ; its glories gather ; until it consum- 
mates its effort in the perfected communion of God and man, — 
in Him Who completes and closes the story of this ever-growing 



i. Faith. 35 

Intimacy, by that act of supreme condescension which brings 
down God to inhabit and possess the heart of man ; and by that 
act of supreme exaltation which uplifts man into absolute union 
with the God Who made him. 

This is the story : the Bible is its record. As a body of inci- 
dents and facts it must be subject to all the conditions of history 
and the laws of evidence ; as a written record it introduces a 
swarm of questions, which can be sifted and decided by rational 
criticism. This entails complications, it must be confessed ; but 
they are inevitable. The intimacy between man and God cannot 
advance, except through the pressure of connected and recorded 
experience. A human society which has no record of its past is 
robbed of its future. It is savage ; it cannot go forward, because 
it cannot look back. So with this divine friendship. Its recorded 
experiences are the one condition of its growth. Without them 
it must always be beginning afresh ; it must remain imprisoned at 
the starting-post. The length and complexity of its record is the 
measure of its progress ; even though they must present, at the 
same time, a larger surface to the handling of criticism, and may 
involve a deeper degree of obscurity in details. 

And, after all, though details drawn out of a dead past permit 
obscurity, the nature and character of the main issue become ever 
more fixed and distinct, as the long roll of circumstances discloses 
its richer secrets. The very shift and confusion of the surface- 
material throws out, in emphatic contrast, the firm outlines of the 
gathering and growing mystery. Ever the advance proceeds, 
throwing off all that is accidental, immaterial, subservient ; ever 
man becomes clearer in his recognition of the claims made on him 
by the hope which God keeps ever before Him, ' They shall be My 
people : I will be their God.' Ever the necessities of such an 
intimate affection point to the coming of the Christ. Christ is the 
end, the sum, the completion, of this historic friendship ; and His 
advent is, therefore, absolutely unintelligible unless it is held in 
relation to the long experience, which He interprets, justifies, and 
fulfils. Faith in Christ is the last result, the ultimate and perfected 
condition of that faith of Abraham, which enabled him to become 
the first friend of God. And the immense experience that lay 
between Abraham and St. Paul, can alone bridge the interval, can 
alone exhibit the slow and laborious evolution, through which the 
primitive apprehension of God was transformed into the Christian 
Creed, — that mighty transformation, spread out over two thousand 
years of varied history, which our Lord summed up in the light- 
ning-flash, ' Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day : and he 



36 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

saw it, and was glad.' The Book is the record of those tested 
and certified experiments, which justified our Lord in asserting 
that to believe in God was, necessarily, to believe in Him. No 
one can understand that assertion, unless by seeing it worked out, 
in detail, by the searching logic of experience. 

Faith in Christ, then, includes faith in the Bible ; and in saying 
that, we have already cleared away much of the difficulty that 
beset us. For our faith in Christ becomes the measure and stand- 
ard of our faith in the Bible. We believe in it as the record of 
our, growing intimacy with God. Faith is, still, a spiritual cohesion 
of person with person, — of the living soul with a living God. No 
details that intervene confuse this primitive relation. Only, that 
cohesion was not reached at one leap. It is ancient : it has 
traversed many incidents and trials : it has learned much : it 
has undergone patient apprenticeship : it has been bonded by the 
memory of multitudinous vicissitudes. Like all else that is human, 
it has grown. The details of events are the media of that growth. 
In that character they are vitally essential to the formed inti- 
macy ; but in that character alone. They are not valued for 
their own sake, but for the cause which they served. Belief in 
God never changes its character, and becomes belief in facts ; it 
only develops into a deeper and deeper belief in God, as dis- 
ciplined by facts. The facts must be real, if the discipline is to 
be real ; but apart from this necessity, we are indifferent to them. 
We can listen to anything which historical criticism has to tell us, 
of dates and authorship, of time and place. It may supply all the 
gaps in our record, showing how the material there, briefly gathered, 
had itself a story, and slowly came together, and had sources and 
associations elsewhere. All such research adds interest to the 
record, as it opens out to us the action of the Divine Intimacy, in 
laying hold of its material. We watch it, by the aid of such criti- 
cism, at its work of assimilation ; and in uncovering its principles 
of selection, we apprehend its inner mind ; we draw closer to our 
God. The more nearly we can ally the early conditions of Israel 
to those of Arabian nomads, the more delicate and rare becomes 
our apprehension of that divine relationship which, by its perpetual 
pressure, lifted Israel to its marvellous supremacy, and which, by 
its absence, left the Arabian to be what he is to-day. 

The point at which criticism must hold off its hands is, of 
course, a most subtle matter to decide. But we can, at least, be 
sure of this : that such a point will be no arbitrary one ; it will 
be there, where criticism attempts to trench on the reality and 
the uniqueness of the Divine Intimacy, which those incidents 



I. Faith. 37 

served to fashion, and those books detected and recorded, and 
Christ consummated. Our faith in Christ must determine what, in 
the Bible, is vital to its own veracity. There is no other measure 
or rule of what we mean by inspiration. 

The preparation for Christ, then, necessitates such complications 
as these. And the character of His advent intensified and thick- 
ened them. For, while asking of us the purest form of spiritual 
adherence, He makes that demand in a shape which is imbedded 
throughout in concrete historical facts which, as facts, must be 
subject to the thumb of critical discussion, and to all the external 
handling of evidence and argument. 

And, then, on the top of this, He has, of necessity, raised the 
question of His own Personality to such a pitch of vital value that 
the full force of man's intellectual activities is drawn towards its 
consideration, — is summoned to contemplate, and measure, and 
apprehend it ; is compelled to examine and face its tremendous 
issues. The supreme act of personal surrender, for which Christ 
unhesitatingly asks, cannot conceivably pass beyond its child- 
stage without forming a direct and urgent challenge to the intellect 
to say how and why such an act can be justified, or such a claim 
interpreted. No faith can reach to such an absolute condition 
without finding itself involved in anxieties, perils, problems, com- 
plications. Its very absoluteness is a provocation to the ques- 
tioning and disputing mind, — to the hesitating and scrupulous will. 
And the result, the inevitable result, of such a faith — proposed, 
as it was, to a world no longer young and childlike, but matured, 
old, thoughtful, experienced — is the Dogmatic Creeds. We 
clamor against these intellectual complications ; we cry out for 
the simple primitive faith. But, once again, it is a mistake of 
dates. We cannot ask to be as if eighteen centuries had dropped 
out, unnoticed, — as if the mind had slumbered since the days of 
Christ, and had never asked a question. We cannot hope to be 
in the same condition after a question has been asked as we were 
before it had ever occurred to us to ask it. The Creeds only re- 
cord that certain questions have, as a fact, been asked. Could our 
world be what it is, and not have asked them? These difficulties 
of a complicated faith are only the reflection of the difficulties of 
a complicated life. If, as a fact, we are engaged in living a life 
which is intricate, subtle, anxious, then any faith which hopes 
to cover and embrace that life, cannot escape the necessity of 
being intricate, subtle, and anxious also. No child's creed can 
satisfy a man's needs, hunger, hopes, anxieties. If we are asked 
to throw over the complications of our Creeds, we must beg those 



33 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

that ask us to begin by throwing over the complications of this 
social and moral life. 

But still, with the Creeds as with the Bible, it is the personal 
intimacy with God in Christ which alone is our concern. We do 
not, in the strict sense, believe in the Bible, or in the Creeds : we 
believe solely and absolutely in Christ Jesus. Faith is our living 
act of adherence in Him, of cohesion with God. But still, once 
more, we must recognize that this act of adhesion has a history ; 
it has gradually been trained and perfected : and this has been 
accomplished through the long and perilous experiences recorded 
in the Old Testament ; and it has been consummated in the final 
sealing of the perfected intimacy attained in Him, in Whose per- 
son it was realized and made possible for us : and it has been 
guarded and secured to us in the face of the overwhelming pres- 
sure of eighteen strong, stormy, and distracted centuries. And 
therefore it is that we now must attain our cohesion with God, 
subject to all the necessities laid upon us by the fact that we enter 
on the world's stage at a late hour, when the drama has already 
developed its plot and complicated its situations. This is why we 
cannot now, in full view of the facts, believe in Christ, without 
finding that our belief includes the Bible and the Creeds. 

V. Faith is, still and always, a spiritual intimacy, a living friend- 
ship with God. That is what we must be forever asserting. That 
is the key to all our problems ; and once sure of this in all its 
bearings, we shall not be afraid of a taunt which is apt to sting 
especially those of us who are ordained. It is conveyed, in its 
noblest form, in a book of Mr. John Morley's, on Compromise. 
No one can read that book without being the better or the worse 
for it. The intense force of high moral convictions acts upon us 
like a judgment. It evokes the deepest conscience in us to come 
forward, and stand at that austere bar and justify itself, or, in fail- 
ing to justify itself, sink condemned. And in that book he asks 
the old question, with unequalled power : How can it possibly be 
honest for men to sign away their reason at the age of twenty- 
three ; to commit themselves to conclusions Which they cannot 
have mastered ; to anticipate beforehand all that experience may 
have to teach? In committing themselves to positions which 
any new knowledge or discovery may reverse, they have forbid- 
den themselves the free use of their critical faculties ; they have 
resigned their intellectual conscience. 

What do we answer to that severe arraignment? Surely we 
now know well. Faith is an affair of personal intimacy, of friend- 
ship, of will, of love ; and, in all such cases, we should know 



i. Faith. 39 

exactly what to do with language of this type. We should laugh 
it out of court. For it is language which does not belong to this 
region. It is the language, it expresses the temper, of the scien- 
tific student, — a temper, an attitude specialized for a distinct 
purpose. That purpose is one of gradual advance into regions as 
yet untouched, and unsuspected, — an advance which is forever 
changing the relations and classifications of those already partially 
known. The temper essential to such a purpose must be prepared 
for discovery, for development, for the unexpected ; it is bound 
to be tentative, experimental, hypothetical; to be cool, critical, 
corrective. It deals with impersonal matter; and it must itself, 
therefore, be as far as possible impersonal, abstract, non-moral, 
without passion, without individuality, without a private intention, 
or will, or fixed opinion. 

But such a temper, perfectly justified for scientific purposes, is 
absolutely impotent and barren in matters of moral feeling and 
practice. 

The man who brings this temper into play in affairs of the will, 
or the heart, or the imagination ; in cases of affection, friendship, 
passion, inspiration, generosity ; in the things of home, of war, of 
patriotism, of love, — is in the wrong world ; he is a living blunder ; 
he has no cue, no key, no interpretation. He is simply absurd. 

And religion stands with these affairs. Just as we see well 
enough that if love were approached in this scientific spirit, it 
could not even begin, so it is quite as certain that, if faith were 
approached in this spirit, it could not even begin. 

Mr. Morley has mixed up two different worlds. He is criticis- 
ing that form of knowledge which consists in spiritual apprehension 
of another's personality through the whole force of a man's inhe- 
rent, and integral, and personal will and desire, by the standard of 
another form of knowledge altogether, which consists in gradual 
and experimental assimilation of foreign and unknown matter 
through specialized organs of critical observation. 

This latter knowledge is bound to be as far as possible emptied 
of personal elements. But our knowledge is nothing if not per- 
sonal ; it is the knowledge which issues, and issues only, out of the 
personal contact of life with life. And this is why it can afford to 
anticipate the future. For a person is a consistent and integral 
whole ; if you know it at any one point, you know it in a sense at 
all points. The one character, the one will, disclose themselves 
through every partial expression, and passing gesture, and varying 
act. Therefore it is that, when two personalities draw towards one 
another in the touch of love, they can afford to plight their word. 



40 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

For love is the instinctive prophecy of a future adherence. It is 
the assurance, passing from soul to soul, that no new discovery 
of what is involved in their after-life together can ever deny, or 
defeat, or destroy their present mutual coherence in each other. 
That adhesion, that adaptability, which has been proved at a 
few points, will necessarily be justified throughout. The marriage- 
pledge expresses the absolute conviction that the present expe- 
rience is irreversible, except by wilful sin. Whatever novelties 
the years bring with them, those two characters will abide what 
they are to-day. Growth cannot radically alter them. 

Love, then, is this confident anticipation, which takes the future 
in pledge. And where this anticipation breaks down, it must be 
through human infirmity, wrong, misunderstanding. 

And our knowledge of Christ is this knowledge of love ; wher- 
ever it exists, and so far as it exists, it issues out of personal con- 
tact, personal interaction. This is why, in its tested and certified 
form, — i. e., in the accumulated and historic experience of the 
Catholic community, — it can rationally justify its anticipation of 
an unbroken adherence. 

And it can do so with complete confidence, because, here, on 
the side of Christ, there is no infirmity which can endanger the 
plighted faith ; there is no lapse, no decline possible. Christ must 
be loyal, for He is sinless. And more : being sinless, He is con- 
sistent. Every part of Him is in harmony with the whole : in Him 
there is no unsteadiness, no insecurity. Such a flawless character 
is identical with itself; wherever it is touched, it can be tested and 
approved. 

What, then, can upset our trust in Him ? What can disturb our 
knowledge of Him? What fear of change can the years bring on? 
We may know but a tiny fragment, a fringe, of this love of His to 
us, yet that is enough ; to have felt it at all is to trust it forever. 
We cannot hesitate to commit ourselves to One Who, if we know 
Him in any way, is known to be, by inward, personal, inherent 
necessity, the ' same yesterday, to-day, and forever.' 

Yes ! But still it may be pleaded that this anticipatory adhe- 
rence, which might justifiably be given to a person beloved, can- 
not be pledged to dogmatic definitions. These, at any rate, are 
matters, not of love, but of reason : they must be liable to critical 
examination, to intellectual revision. It is the pledge given to 
believe these dogmas in the future, which is such an outrage on 
intellectual morality. 

Now, this protest, forcible and obvious as it looks at first sight, 
is still guilty of confusing the criticism which belongs to one 



I. Faith > 41 

province of knowledge with that which belongs to another. These 
dogmas of faith do not the least correspond to the classifications and 
laws of physical science ; and for this reason, that the matter to which 
they relate is wholly different in kind. Dogmas represent reason in 
its application to a personal life : scientific generalizations represent 
reason as applied to matter, from which the conditions of person- 
ality have been rigorously and rightly excluded. The difference is 
vital ; and it affects the entire character of the working of reason. 

The dogmatic definitions of Christian theology can never be 
divorced from their contact in the personality of Christ. They are 
statements concerning a living character. As such, and only as 
such, do they come within the lines of faith. We do not, in the 
strict sense, believe in them : for belief is never a purely intellec- 
tual act ; it is a movement of the living man drawn towards a liv- 
ing person. Belief can only be in Jesus Christ. To Him alone do 
we ever commit ourselves, surrender ourselves, for ever and aye. 
But a personality, though its roots lie deeper than reason, yet 
includes reason within its compass : a personality cannot but be 
rational, though it be more than merely rational ; it has in it a ratio- 
nal ground, a rational construction ; it could not be what it is with- 
out being of such and such a fixed and organic character. And a 
personality, therefore, is intelligible ; it lays itself open to rational 
treatment ; its characteristics can be stated in terms of thought. 
The Wiil of God is the Word of God ; the Life is also the Light. 
That which is loved can be apprehended ; that which is felt can be 
named. So the Personality of the Word admits of being rationally 
expressed in the sense that reason can name and distinguish those 
elements in it which constitute its enduring and essential condi- 
tions. The dogmas, now in question, are simply careful rehearsals 
of those inherent necessities which, inevitably, are involved in the 
rational construction of Christ's living character. They are state- 
ments of what He must be, if He is what our hearts assure us ; if 
He can do that for which our wills tender Him their life-long self- 
surrender. Unless these rational conditions stand, then, no act of 
faith is justifiable ; unless His personality correspond to these 
assertions, we can never be authorized in worshipping Him. 

But, if so, then we can commit ourselves to these dogmas in the 
same way and degree as we commit ourselves to Him. We can 
do so, in the absolute assurance that He cannot but abide forever, 
that which we know Him to be to-day. We know Him, indeed, 
but ' in part ; ' but it is part of a fixed and integral character, which 
is whole in every part, and can never falsify, in the future, the 
revelation which it has already made of itself. 



42 The Religion of the Ijicarnation. 

The real question, as to Christian dogma, lies in the prior ques- 
tion : Is Christianity justified in claiming to have reached a final 
position? If the position is rightly final, then the intellectual 
expression of its inherent elements is final also. Here is the deep 
contrast between it and science. The scientific man is forbidden, 
by the very nature of his studies, to assume finality for his proposi- 
tions. For he is not yet in command of his material. Far, very 
far, from it. He is touching it on its very edge. He is engaged 
in slowly pushing tentative advances into an unknown world, loom- 
ing, vast, dim, manifold, beyond his frontier of light. The cohe- 
rence of his known matter with that huge mass beyond his ken, can 
be but faintly imaged and suspected. Wholly unreckoned forces 
are in operation. At any moment he may be called upon to throw 
over the classification which sums up his hitherto experience ; he 
may have to adopt a new centre ; to bring his facts into a novel 
focus : and this involves at once a novel principle of arrangement. 
In such conditions dogma is, of course, an absurdity. But if we 
are in a position to have any faith in Jesus Christ, then we must 
suppose that we have arrived at the one centre to all possible 
experiences, the one focus under which all sights must fall. To 
believe in Him at all is to believe that, by and in i this Man, will 
God judge the world.' In His personality, in His character, we 
are in possession of the ultimate principle, under which the final 
estimate of all things will be taken. We have given us, in His sac- 
rifice and mission, the absolute rule, standard, test, right to the 
very end. Nothing can fall outside it. In Him. God has summed 
up creation. We have touched in Him the ' last days,' the ulti- 
mate stage of all development. We cannot believe in Him at all, 
and not believe that His message is final. 

And it is this finality which justifies dogma. If Christianity is 
final, it can afford to be dogmatic ; and we, who give our adhesion 
to it, must, in so doing, profess our adhesion to the irreversible 
nature of its inherent principles ; for, in so doing, we are but 
reasserting our belief in the absolute and final sufficiency of 
His person. 

Let us venture, now, to review the path that we have travelled, 
in order that we may see at what point we have arrived. Faith, 
then, is, from first to last, a spiritual act of the deepest personal 
will, proceeding out of that central core of the being, where the 
self is integral and whole, before it has sundered itself off into 
divided faculties. There, in that root-self, lie the germs of all that 
appears in the separate qualities and gifts, — in feelings, in reason, 
in imagination, in desire ; and faith, the central activity, has in it, 



I. Faith. 43 

therefore, the germs of all these several activities. It has in it that 
which becomes feeling, yet is not itself a feeling. It has in it that 
which becomes reason, yet is not itself the reason. It holds in it 
imaginative elements, yet is no exercise of the imagination. It is 
alive with that which desires, craves, loves, yet is not itself merely 
an appetite, a desire, a passion. In all these qualities it has its 
part ; it shares their nature ; it has kindred motions ; it shows 
itself, sometimes through the one, and sometimes through the 
other, according to the varieties of human characters. In this 
man, it can make the feeling its main instrument and channel ; in 
that man, it will find the intellect its chief minister ; in another, it 
will make its presence known along the track of his innermost 
craving for a support in will and in love. But it will always remain 
something over, and beyond, any one of its distinctive media ; and 
not one of these specialities of gift will ever, therefore, be able to 
account wholly for the faith which puts it to use. That is why 
faith must always remain beyond its realized evidences. If it finds, 
in some cases, its chief evidences in the region of feeling, it is 
nevertheless open to deadly ruin, if ever it identifies itself with 
these evidences, as if it could rely on them to carry it through. 
It may come into being by their help ; but it is never genuine 
faith, until it can abide in self-security at those dry hours when 
the evidences of positive feeling have been totally withdrawn. 
And as with feeling, so with reason. Faith looks to reason for 
its proofs ; it must count on finding them ; it offers for itself intel- 
lectual justifications. It may arrive at a man by this road. But it 
is not itself reason ; it can never confuse itself with a merely intel- 
lectual process. It cannot, therefore, find, in reason, the full 
grounds for its ultimate convictions. Ever it retains its own in- 
herent character, by which it is constituted an act of personal 
trust, an act of willing and loving self-surrender to the dominant 
sway of another's personality. It is always this, whether it springs 
up instinctively, out of the roots of our being, anticipating all 
after-proof, or whether it is summoned out into vitality at the close 
of a long and late argumentative process. No argument, no array 
of arguments, however long, however massive, can succeed in 
excusing it from that momentous effort of the inner man, which is 
its very essence. Let reason do its perfect work ; let it heap up 
witness upon witness, proof upon proof. Still there will come at 
last the moment when the call to believe will be just the same to 
the complete and reasonable man as it always is to the simplest 
child, — the call to trust Another with a confidence which reason 
can justify, but can never create. This act, which is faith, must 



44 TJie Religion of the Incarnation. 

have in it that spirit of venture, which closes with Another's invita- 
tion, which yields to Another's call. It must still have in it and 
about it the character of a vital motion, — of a leap upward, which 
dares to count on the prompting energies felt astir within it. 

Faith cannot transfer its business into other hands to do its 
work for it. It cannot request reason to take its own place, or 
achieve its proper results. There is no possibility of devolution 
here ; it cannot delegate its functions to this faculty or to that. It 
is by forgetting this that so many men are to be found, at the close 
of many arguments of which they fully acknowledge the convin- 
cing force, still hovering on the brink of faith, never quite reaching 
it, never passing beyond the misery of a prolonged and nerveless 
suspense. They hang back at the very crisis, because they have 
hoped that their reasoning powers would, by their own force, have 
made belief occur. They are like birds on a bough, who should 
refuse to fly until they have fully known that they can. - Their 
suspense would break and pass, if once they remembered that, to 
enter the Kingdom of Heaven, they must always be as little chil- 
dren. They must call upon the child within them. At the end, 
as at the beginning, of all the argumentative work, it is still the 
temper of a child which they must bring into play. There must 
still be the energy of self-committal, — the movement of a brave 
surrender. Once let them turn, enforced by all the pressure of 
reasonable evidence, to this secret fount of life within the self, 
and back flows the strength which was theirs long ago, when the 
inspiration of their innate sonship moved sweetly in them, breed- 
ing confidence, secure of itself, undaunted and unfatigued. That 
sonship abides in us all, cumbered and clouded though it be by 
our sin ; it abides on and on, fed by the succors of a Father 
Who can never forget or forsake, and Who is working hitherto to 
recover and redeem. And while it abides, faith is still possible. 
For its native motions are the spontaneous outcome of that spirit- 
ual kinship which, if once alive and free, impels us towards Him 
by Whose love we have been begotten. Reason and feeling, proof 
and argument, — these are means and instruments by which we 
can invoke this sonship into action, and release it from much 
which fetters and enslaves. But it is the actual upspringing force 
of the sonship itself, which alone can be the source of belief. 
And as it is given to all to be sons of God, through the eternal 
sonship of Christ, therefore it is open to all to count upon possess- 
ing the conditions of faith in God. 



II. 

THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD. 



AUBREY MOORE. 



II. 

THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD. 

I. The object of this essay is not to discuss the so-called ' proofs ' 
of the existence of God, but to show what the Christian doctrine of 
God is, and how it has grown to be what it is, out of the antago- 
nisms of earlier days ; and then to ask : What fuller realization of 
God's revelation of Himself is He giving us through the contradic- 
tions and struggles of to-day ? If it is true that ' the only ultimate 
test of reality is persistence, and the only measure of validity 
among our primitive beliefs the success with which they resist all 
efforts to change them,' 1 it is of first importance to discover 
what it is which, through all the struggles of past history, the reli- 
gious nature of man has persistently clung to. Much which was 
once dear to the religious consciousness, and which seemed at the 
time to be an integral part of the religious idea, has been given up. 
A former age abandoned it with regret, and looked forward with 
gloomy foreboding. A later age looks back with thankfulness, and 
recognizes ' the good Hand of our God ' leading us to truer knowl- 
edge of Himself. 

It would be idle to deny — after all due allowance has been made 
for the natural tendency to believe that the present is the critical 
moment, not only for us, but for the world at large — that the crisis 
of the present day is a very real one, and that the religious view of 
God is feeling the effects of the change which is modifying our 
views of the world and man. When such a fundamental idea is 
challenged, men are naturally tempted to adopt one of two equally 
one-sided attitudes, — to commit themselves either to a policy of 
unintelligent protest, or to a policy of unconditional surrender. 
And if the one is needlessly despairing, the other is unwarrantably 
sanguine. The one asks : ' How much must I give up, of what 
religion has always been to me, that a little of the old may sur- 
vive amidst the new ? ' The other asks : ' How little of the old 
need I keep, so as not to interfere with the ready acceptance of 
the new?' The one view is pessimist, the other optimist. Both 
have their representatives in our day, and each party is pro- 

1 Fiske, Idea of God, p. 139, quoting H. Spencer. 



48 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

% foundly conscious of the danger to which the other is exposed. 
The advocates of the one view, finding themselves 'in a place 
where two seas meet,' think it safer to ' run the ship aground;' 
those of the other, ' seeing they cannot bear up against the wind,' 
prefer to ' let her drive.' But if the spirit of the one is merely 
protestant, the spirit of the other is certainly not catholic. 

In contrast with these one-sided views, we propose to approach 
the question in the full conviction that the revelation of God in 
Christ is both true and complete, and yet that every new truth 
which flows in from the side of science, or metaphysics, or the 
experience of social and political life, is designed in God's provi- 
dence to make that revelation real, by bringing out its hidden 
truths. It is in this sense that the Christian revelation of God 
claims to be both final and progressive : final, for Christians know 
but one Christ, and do not ' look for another ; ' progressive, 
because Christianity claims each new truth as enriching our knowl- 
edge of God, and bringing out into greater clearness and distinct- 
ness some half-understood fragment of its own teaching. There 
are, no doubt, always to be found Christians, who are ready to 
treat new knowledge as the Caliph Omar treated the books in the 
library of Alexandria, — ' they agree with the Koran, and are unne- 
cessary, or they disagree with it, and must be destroyed.' But an 
intelligent Christian will not ask, ' Does this new truth agree with 
or contradict the letter of the Bible ? ' but ' How does it interpret 
and help us to understand the Bible ? ' And so with regard to all 
truth, whether it comes from the side of science, or history, or 
criticism, he adopts neither the method of protest nor the method 
of surrender, but the method of assimilation. In the face of new 
discoveries, the only question he is anxious to answer is this : 
' What old truth will they explain, or enlighten, or make real 
to us? What is this new world of life and interest which is 
awaiting its consecration? "Truth is an ever-flowing river, into 
which streams flow in from many sides." 1 What is this new 
stream which is about to empty itself, as all knowledge must, 
into the great flood of Divine truth, " that the earth may be filled 
with the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea " ? ' 

Such a hopeful attitude does not, indeed, imply that the assimi- 
lation of the new truths will go on as a matter of course. The 
Christian knows that the acceptance of truth is a moral, as well as 
an intellectual matter, and in the moral world there is no place for 
laisser /aire. He expects to be called upon to struggle; he 

1 St. Clem. Alex., Strom., I. v. 






II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 49 

expects that the struggle will need his utmost effort, moral and 
intellectual. His work is both to keep and to claim ; to hold fast 
the faith ' once for all delivered to the saints/ and yet to see in 
every fragment of truth a real revelation of the mind and will of 
God. He has no cut-and-dried answer to objections ; he does 
not boast that he has no difficulties. But he does claim to look 
out upon the difficulties of his day, not only fearlessly, but with 
hope and trust. He knows that Christianity must triumph in the 
end, but he does not expect all difficulties to be removed in a 
moment. And he is strong enough, if need be, to wait. 

II. Whether any one is really guilty of what Hume calls the 
' multiplied indiscretion and imprudence ' of dogmatic atheism, 
whether positivism can rightly be so classed, whether agnosticism 
is not atheism to all intents and purposes, are questions which 
fortunately, lie outside the scope of the present inquiry. As for 
polytheism, it has ceased to exist in the civilized world. Every 
theist is, by a rational necessity, a monotheist. But we find our- 
selves, in the present day, face to face with two different views of 
God, which, though they constantly, perhaps generally, overlap, 
and even sometimes coincide, yet imply different points of view, 
and by a process of abstraction can be held apart and contrasted 
with one another. Many devout Christians are philosophers and 
men of science ; many men of science and philosophers are devout 
Christians. But the God of religion is not the God of science 
and philosophy. Ideally, every one will allow that the religious 
idea of God and the scientific and philosophical idea of God must 
be identical ; but in actual fact it is not so, and in the earlier 
stages of the development of both, there is a real antagonism. To 
accept this antagonism as absolute is, by a necessary consequence, 
to compel one to give way to the other. We cannot long hold 
two contradictory truths. We find ourselves compelled to choose. 
We may have Religion or Philosophy, but not both. 

Very few, however, are prepared to go this length. It is much 
more usual to get rid of the antagonism by adopting one of two 
alternative methods. 

(1) Of these the first is a suggested division of territory, in 
which religion is allotted: to faith, and philosophy and science to 
reason. Such an expedient, though not uncommonly, and perhaps 
even wisely, adopted by individuals, who refuse to give up either 
of two truths because they cannot harmonize them, becomes ridicu- 
lous when seriously proposed as a solution of the difficulty. 
Moreover the proposed division of territory is unfair to start with. 
1 Give us the Knowable, and you shall have the rest, which is far 

4 



SO The Religion of the Incarnation. 

the larger half/ sounds like a liberal offer made by science to re- 
ligion, till we remember that every advance in knowledge transfers 
something from the side of the unknown to the side of the known, 
in violation of the original agreement. Mr. Herbert Spencer calls 
this division of territory a 'reconciliation.' 1 But if anything in 
the world could make religion hate and fear science and oppose 
the advance of knowledge, it is to find itself compelled to sit still 
and watch the slow but sure filching away of its territory by an 
alien power. We say nothing here of the fact that Mr. Herbert 
Spencer's division ignores the truth that knowledge of correlatives 
must be of the same kind, 2 and that if knowledge has to do with 
one and faith with the other, either faith must be a sort of knowl- 
edge, or knowledge a sort of faith. We merely notice the unfair- 
ness of a division which assumes rationality for science, and leaves 
irrationality to religion. 

Curiously enough, however, there are many devout people, who 
would be horrified at the thought that they had borrowed from 
Agnosticism, and who have nevertheless made a similar division of 
territory. They are the people who stake all upon what reason 
cannot do. They have no interest in the progress of knowledge. 
The present gaps in science are their stronghold, and they natur- 
ally resist every forward step in knowledge as long as they can, 
because each new discovery limits the area in which alone, accord- 
ing to their imperfect view, faith can live. Every triumph of sci- 
ence on this theory, as on Mr. Herbert Spencer's, becomes a loss, 
not a gain, to religion. The very existence of God is bound up 
with that part of His work in nature which we cannot understand, 
and, as a consequence, we reach the paradox that the more we 
know of His working, the less proof we have that He exists. Mod- 
ern apologetic literature abounds in this kind of argument. It is 
the devout form of the worship of the unknowable. Yet it is no 
wonder that people who take refuge in gaps find themselves awk- 
wardly placed when the gaps begin to close. 

(2) The other alternative is even more commonly adopted, for 
it fits in well with the vagueness and want of precision in language, 
which is at a premium in dealing with religious questions. This 
consists in frittering away the meaning of definite terms till they are 
available for anything, or adopting a neutral term which, by a little 
management and stretching, will include opposites. This is the 
method of indefinite inclusion. The strength of the former alter- 
native lay in the appearance of sharp scientific delimitation of terri- 

1 Cf. Herbert Spencer, First Principles, Pt. I. 

2 See this criticism excellently stated in Caird's Phil, of Religion, pp.32 etc. 






II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 51 

tory ; the strength of the latter, in its unlimited comprehensiveness. 
A term is gradually stripped of the associations which make it what 
it is, it is ' defecated to a pure transparency, 5 and then it is ready 
for use. The term ' God ' is made merely ' a synonym for nature ; ' l 
religion becomes 'habitual and permanent admiration,' 2 or ' de- 
vout submission of the heart and will to the laws of nature ; ' 3 
enthusiasm does duty for worship, and the antagonism between 
religion and anything else disappears. 

Now so far as this represents, negatively, a reaction against intol- 
erance and narrowness, and positively a desire for unity, there is 
not a word to be said against it. Its tone and temper may Ipe both 
Christian and Catholic. But the method is a radically false one. 
It is not a real, but only an abstract, unity which can be reached 
by thinking away of differences. As Dr. Martineau says, in his ex- 
cellent criticism of this method, e You vainly propose an eirenicon 
by corruption of a word.' ' The disputes between science and 
faith can no more be closed by inventing " religions of culture " 
than the boundary quarrels of nations by setting up neutral provinces 
in the air.' 4 ' A God that is merely nature, a Theism without God, 
a Religion forfeited only by the "nil admirari," can never reconcile 
the secular and the devout, the Pagan and the Christian mind.' 5 
As well might we attempt to reconcile the partisans of the gold 
and silver shields by assuring them that in reality the shields were 
silver gilt. 

We are left, then, face to face with the opposition between the 
religious and the philosophic or scientific view of God. The coun- 
ter-charges of superstition and anthropomorphism on the one side, 
and of pantheism and rationalism on the other, serve to bring out 
the antithesis of the two views. No division of territory is possi- 
ble. There may be many sciences, each with its defined range of 
subject-matter ; but there can be only one God. And both reli- 
gion and philosophy demand that He shall fill the whole region of 
thought and feeling. Nor can any confusion or extension of terms 
help us to a reconciliation, or blind us long to the true issue. 
The conflict is too real and too keenly felt to admit of any patched- 
lp peace. The idea of God, which is to claim alike the allegiance 
of religion and philosophy, must not be the result of compromise, 
but must really and fully satisfy the demands of both. 

1 Natural Religion, iii. 45, quoted by Martineau. 

2 Ibid., iv. 74. 

3 Frederic Harrison's New Year's Address, 1884. 

4 A Study of Religion, i. 11, 12. 
Ibid., p. 15. 



52 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

III. What then are these demands considered in abstraction 
from one another ? We are at once met by the difficulty of defining 
religion. But if we cannot define religion, or trace it back to its 
hidden source, we can at least discover its characteristics, as we 
know it after it has emerged from the obscurity of prehistoric 
times, and before any conscious attempt has been made to 
reconcile religion and philosophy, or find a middle term between 
them. 

Now, traditional definitions of religion given, as it were, from 
within, and constructed with no view of opposition to, or recon- 
ciliation with philosophy, are agreed in representing religion as 
a relation between man and the object or objects of his worship ; 
and this implies, not only the inferiority of the worshipper to that 
which he worships, but also something of likeness between the 
related terms, since, as even Strauss allows, in our inmost nature 
we feel a kinship between ourselves and that on which we depend. 1 
It is quite indifferent which of the rival etymologies of the word 
' religion ' we adopt. 2 St. Augustine, 3 following Lactantius, speaks 
of religion as ' the bond which binds us to One Omnipotent God.' 
St. Thomas 4 adopts almost unchanged the definition given by 
Cicero ; it is l that virtue which has to do with the worship of a 
higher nature known as the Divine.' It is not too much to say 
that, for the modern religious world, religion implies at least the 
practical belief in a real and conscious relation between the inner 
life of man and an unseen Being. And whatever of mystery 
there may be about that unseen Being, it would seem as if a real 
relationship demands so much of likeness in the related terms as 
is implied in personality. 

It is here that we reach the point at which we are able to distin- 
guish between the religious and the philosophical ideas of God. It 
is not that religion and philosophy necessarily contradict or exclude 
one another, but that they approach the problem with different 
interests. Religion demands a personal object, be that object one 
or many. It is committed to the belief in a moral relationship 
between God and man. Philosophy demands unity, whether per- 
sonal or impersonal. For philosophy is nothing if it does not 
completely unify knowledge. And it seems as if each finds lack- 

i Old Faith and New, § 41. ..... 

2 ' Hoc vinculo pietatis obstricti Deo et religati sumus, unde ipsa religio 
nomen accepit, non ut Cicero interpretatus est, a relegendo.' — Lact., Inst., 
iv. 28. 

3 De vera religione, sub fin. 

* Sum. Theol., 2, 2, 81, Art. I. 



ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 53 

ing in the other that which it values most and thinks of first. The 
only hope, then, of reconciliation is in the idea of God as per- 
sonal, and yet one. So long as religion retains a trace of poly- 
theism or dualism, philosophy can have nothing to say to it. So 
long as philosophy has no room for a personal God, religion must 
exclude philosophy. The whole issue of the controversy lies here. 
If the belief in a personal God is to be called anthropomorphism, 
religion is hopelessly anthropomorphic. With the disappearance of 
anthropomorphism in this sense, as Professor Fiske rightly sees, 1 
religion disappears. But we cannot escape anthropomorphism, 
though our anthropomorphism may be crude or critical. 2 We do 
not read our full selves into the lower world, because we are higher 
than it \ we do not transfer to God all that belongs to our own self- 
consciousness, because we know that He is infinitely greater than 
we are. But we should be wrong not to interpret Him by the 
highest category within our reach, and think of Him as self-con- 
scious life. Christianity refuses to call this anthropomorphism, 
though it stands or falls with the belief that, in his personality, 
man is in the image of God. An anthropomorphic view of God 
for a Christian means heathenism or heresy ; a theomorphic view 
of man is of the essence of his faith. 3 

The religious idea of God may, of course, become philo- 
sophical without ceasing to be religious. If there is to be a religion 
for man as a rational being it must become so. But there is a 
point beyond which, in its desire to include philosophy, religion 
cannot go. It cannot afford to give up its primary assumption of 
a moral relationship between God and man. When that point is sur- 
rendered or obscured, the old religious terms become increasingly 
inapplicable, and we find ourselves falling back more and more on 
their supposed philosophical equivalents, — the ' Infinite ' or the 
'Absolute,' or the Universal Substance, or the Eternal Conscious- 
ness, or the First Cause, or the Omnipresent Energy. But these 
terms, which metaphysicians rightly claim, have no meaning for the 
religious consciousness, while in metaphysics proper ' God ' is as 
much a borrowed term as ' sin ' is in non-religious ethics. Moral 
?vil is ' sin ' only to those who believe in God ; and the infinite is 
only ' God ' to those in whom it suggests a superhuman personality 

1 Idea of God, p. 117. 

2 See Seth's Hegelianism and Personality, pp. 223, 224 ; one or two sen- 
tences from which are, almost verbatim, transferred to the text. 

3 Justin Martyr (Exhort ad Graec, ch. xxxiv.) explains the anthropo- 
morphisms of polytheism as an inversion of the truth that man is in the 
image of God. 



54 The Religion of the Incarnation, 

with whom they are in conscious relation. Even when religion 
and philosophy both agree to speak of God as ' the Infinite/ for 
the one it is an adjective, for the other a substantive. The moment 
we abandon the idea of God as personal, religion becomes merged 
in philosophy, and all that properly constitutes religion disappears. 
God may exist for us still as the keystone in the arch of knowledge, 
but He is no longer, except as a metaphor, ' our Father, which is 
in heaven.' 

IV. Religion then, properly and strictly, and apart from exten- j 
sions of the term made in the interests of a reconciliation, assumes 
a moral relationship, the relationship of personal beings, as existing 
between man and the Object of his worship. When this ceases, 
religion ceases ; when this begins, religion begins. But of the begin- 
nings of religion we know nothing. Prehistoric history is the 
monopoly of those who have a theory to defend. But we may take 
it as proven that it is at least as true that man is a religious, as that 
he is a rational animal. ' Look out for a people,' says Hume, ' en- 
tirely destitute of religion. If you find them at all, be assured that 
they are but few degrees removed from brutes.' l Hume's state- 
ment is confirmed by the fact that those who would prove that there 
is no innate consciousness of Deity are driven to appeal to the case 
of deaf-mutes and degraded savages. 2 Whether monotheism was 
a discovery or a recovery, whether it rose on the ruins of poly- 
theism, or whether polytheism is a corruption of a purer faith, is a 
question we need not attempt to settle. Nor need we decide the 
priority of claim to the title of religion as between nature-worship, 
or ancestor-worship, or ghost-worship. The farther we go back in 
history, the more obviously true is the charge of anthropomorphism 
so commonly brought against religion. The natural tendency to 
treat the object of religion as personal exists long before any at- 
tempt is made to define the conditions or meaning of personality, 
and includes much which is afterwards abandoned. For religion 
in its earliest stages is instinctive, not reasoned. It is 'naively 
objective.' It is little careful to clear up its idea of the nature 
and character of its God. It is still less anxious to prove His 
existence. It is only when conscience grows strong, and dares to 
challenge the religion which had been instinctively accepted, that 
men learn to see that God not only is, but must be, the expression 
of the highest known morality. It is only when the light of con- 
scious reason is turned back upon religious ideas that polytheism 
becomes not merely untrue, but impossible and inconceivable. 

1 Hume, Essays, ii. 425. 2 H. Spencer, Eccl. Inst., p. 1. 



II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 55 

What religion starts with is not any theory of the world, but an 
unreasoned belief in a Being or beings, however conceived of, who 
shall be in a greater or less degree like the worshipper, but raised 
above him by the addition of power, if not omnipotence ; great- 
ness, if not infinity ; wisdom, if not omniscience. 

But while implying from the first something of a moral relation- 
ship between man and the Object of his worship, religion does not 
always conceive of that Object as necessarily holy or perfectly 
wise. There are religions which are both immoral and childish. 
They have in them no principle of growth, and therefore they are 
the opponents alike of moral and intellectual progress. Tantum 
relligio potuit sicadcre malorum is the reflexion of Christian apolo- 
gists, as well as of the Roman poet, on the religions of heathenism. 
Hence, it is argued, ' Religion is the enemy of morals and of 
science. Away with it ! It is a mere matter of feeling, which 
cannot and ought not to stand before the imperious challenge of 
conscience and reason.' Such a view has both truth and false- 
hood in it. The religious idea of God must be able to justify 
itself to our moral and to our rational nature, on pain of ceasing to 
exist. But religion cannot be thus shut up to one part of our 
nature, nor can one part of our nature be set against the rest. 
There is, as Herbert Spencer is fond of pointing out, 1 a kind of 
idolatry of reason in the present day. Reason has exposed many 
superstitions, only to become itself the final object of superstition. 
Men forget that, after all, reasoning is only 're-coordinating states 
of consciousness already coordinated in certain simpler ways,' and 
that that which is unreasoned is not always irrational. Rationality 
in man is not shut up in one air-tight compartment. ' There is no 
feeling or volition which does not contain in it an element of 
knowledge.' 2 This is the truth whict Hegel has seized when he 
speaks of religion as ' reason talking naively.' You can no more 
shut up faith to the compartment of feeling, than reason to the 
compartment of the intellect. Religion claims the whole man, 
and true religion is that which can make good its claim. 

The natural history of religion, then, is the history of the process 
by which that which has its secret birthplace behind all the distinc- 
tions of modern psychology, establishes its claim on man, absorb- 
ing into itself all that is best and truest in his moral and intellectual 
being, as conscience and reason successively emerge into conscious 
activity : while, from another point of view, it is the progressive 
purification of the religious idea of God till He is revealed as, 

1 Psych, vol. ii. §§ 388-391. 2 Cairo!, Philosophy of Religion, p. 162. 



56 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

what He is to a thinking Christian of to-day, the Object of reverent 
worship, the moral ideal, the truth of nature and of man. 

Such an end is not attained in a moment. It is the result of a 
process with which we are familiar elsewhere, viz. evolution by 
antagonism. The true has to be separated from the false. Im- 
moral and irrational conceptions of God have to be thrown aside. 
It is only after what looks like an internecine struggle between 
religion and morality that man learns the truth about the character 
of God, and only after a conflict with philosophy and science, 
which seems to threaten the very life of religion, that he learns 
what can be known of the Divine Nature. For among religions 
too there is a struggle for existence, in which the fittest survive. 
And the test of fitness is the power to assimilate and promote 
moral and intellectual truth, and so to satisfy the whole man. An 
ideally perfect religion is not ' morality touched by emotion,' but a 
worship which reflects itself in the highest known morality, and is 
interpreted and justified to itself by reason. It is this process, as 
we know it in history, that we proceed to examine. 

V. The statement that religion, even in its most elementary 
forms, takes for granted some relationship of likeness between the 
worshipper and the Object or objects of his worship, by no means 
implies that all religion associates the highest morality with its idea 
of God. On the contrary, we know that not only are there immoral 
religions, but that immorality sometimes lingers on in religion long 
after it is condemned elsewhere, and that a people will permit as a 
religious duty what, according to their thinking, nothing but reli- 
gion would justify. We cannot, then, at all accurately gauge the 
moral condition of a people by the received teaching about its 
gods, for morality is often far in advance of religion, and the charac- 
ter which in a god or goddess is protected by a religious halo is 
looked upon as hateful or impure in man or woman. The sense 
of dependence, which, though it does not constitute the whole, is 
yet an essential element in the religious consciousness, the awe 
which, in a low state of development, shows itself in a grovelling 
fear of the invisible beings, makes it impossible for the worshipper 
to judge his god by the standard he applies to his fellow-man. The 
god may be lustful, but his lusts must be respected ; he is strong 
and vengeful, and must by all means be kept in a good temper, 
cajoled or outwitted, or bribed or humored. His commands 
must be obeyed, without question or resistance. But by and by 
the moral nature learns its strength, and begins to assert its inde- 
pendent right to speak. Morality outgrows religion. The relations 
between religion and morals become more strained. Some heretic 



ii. The Christian i of God. 



57 



re immoral ; that they are men ' writ 
. men too. Their claim to reverence is challenged. 

l moral awaken 3 m the old religion is treated with 

scorn and contempt, and either a new religion taker, its plac< . 
ing in as it were on the • the waye of moral reformation, or 

i i is purified and becomes the foster-mother of the 

new ii. t a divine sanction, and receiving from it 

in turn nc i and vitality. Oi failing th se, men abandon 

>n in the supposed interest of morals. A religion with mys- 
be tolerated, but a religion once seen to be immoral is 
at an i :.■!. 1 >r a time ethics, with a background of metaphysics 
or politics, preva Is ; but gradually it tends to drift into a merepru- 

il philosophy tries m vain to sat- 
per instint tS whi< h It to the unseen. 

In the historj k thought the collision came in the days 

ire what is sometimes called th 
rreece ha I u its traditional re. 

I 5 philosophy at is birth wis mythology rationalized, and the 
of independent morality in G showed itself in a 

II >mer and I lesiod. The 

it times of the way in 

which I of his day. it is not only 

Anthropomorph- 
ism, immorality, childish folly, — these are the < which 
Xenophanes brings against the worship of M I An- 

had alia-ady been banished for suggesting that thi 
I >f molten iron, hut \ nes turns into 

ridicule the religi m of his day. 
* Homer and i [esiod,' he Is all that 

•i is held shameful and blameworthy, — theft, adultery, 
and deceit.' ' 

htiest am and men. who neither 

in form nor thought is like- to mm. Wt mortals think the 

>rn,and I pe and voice and raiment like themselves. 

• Surely tf lions and cows had hands, and could grave with their 

hand,, and do as men do, they too would mal like them- 

'1 have horse-like gods, and cows gods with 

horns and ho. 

When th f moral philosophy begins, amidst the unsettle- 

ment of the sophistii period, the same protest is token up by 



1 Ritter and Preller, Hist Phil. Gneo. 7th ed. I 8a. 

* II.: 



58 The Religion of the Incarnation, 

Plato. In Xenophanes the protest of the reason and the con- 
science went together. In Plato the criticism of the received 
theology is more distinctly a moral criticism. God cannot lie or 
deceive. He cannot be the cause of evil. He is good, and only 
the source of good. He is true in word and deed. If not, we 
cannot reverence Him. It cannot be true that the gods give way 
to violent emotions, still less to sensuality and envy and strife. 1 
' For God cannot be unrighteous, He must be perfectly righteous, 
and none is like Him save the most righteous among men.' 2 

Here we have a collision between an immoral religious con- 
ception of God and a morality which is becoming conscious of 
its own strength. And what was the result? Religion in Greece 
received its death-blow. It had no real recuperative power. It 
could not absorb and claim the new morality. Homer and 
Hesiod, the ' Bible ' of the Athenian, were too profoundly im- 
moral. A Kephalus might go back in silent protest to his sacri- 
fice, but the youth of Athens turned from religion to morality. 
When we pass from Plato to Aristotle, the last trace of religion in 
morals has disappeared. Theology has become Metaphysics, and 
has no place in the world of practical life. The religious element 
has disappeared from philosophy, and is only revived in the mysti- 
cism of Neo-Pythagoreanism and Neo-Platonism. In metaphysics 
and science we owe everything to the Greeks; in religion, as 
distinguished from theology, we owe nothing. 

From the Greeks we turn to the Jews, to whom alone, among 
the nations of the pre-Christian age, we of the modern world 
trace back our religious lineage. We speak of the religion of the 
Old Testament as ' revealed' in contrast with all other pre-Chris- 
tian religions. Is that distinction tenable? If so, what does it 
mean, and what justifies us in making it? It is clear that the 
answer must be sought in what the Old Testament revelation is, 
rather than in the process by which the Jews became the appointed 
depositaries of it. For whatever were the prehistoric elements 
out of which the religion of Israel came, whether Assyrian or 
Accadian or Indo-German or Egyptian, and whatever were the 
steps by which Israel was led 3 to that doctrine of God which con- 
stituted its mission and its message to the world, as we look back 
from the point of view of Christianity we see that the religion of 
Israel stands to the teaching of Christ in a relation in which no 

i Plat., Rep., 377-385- 

2 Thaet, 176 C. 

3 H. Spencer of course follows Kuenen in assuming a polytheistic origin 
of Hebrew monotheism. See Kuenen, Religion of Israel, i. 223. 



ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 59 

Pagan religion stands. 1 The Law and the Prophets were for all 
the world ' a sacred school of the knowledge of God, and the 
ordering of the soul.' 2 If it is true that the Bible only records 
the later and more important stages in a process which began in 
prehistoric times amidst the various forms of polytheistic worship ; 
even if it could be shown that the history, as we have it, has been 
subjected to successive revisions, that its laws have been codified, its 
ritual elaborated, its symbolism interpreted, — it would still remain 
true that the religion 'of Israel, which begins where its history 
begins, and of which, indeed, its history is little more than the 
vehicle, is bound up with the assertion of Monotheism. The 
central fact of its revelation is this, ' Hear, O Israel ! the Lord our 
God is One Lord.' The central utterance of its law is, 'Thou 
shalt have none other gods but Me.' The unity of God, that 
truth which other religions were feeling after and tending towards, 
stands out clearly-and distinctly as the characteristic of the religion 
of Israel, and is fearlessly claimed as an inheritance from the 
patriarchal age. 

And not less remarkable than the assertion of the unity of God 
is the assumption that this One God is a God of Righteousness. 
He is ' a God of truth and without iniquity ; just and right is He.' 
Here, again, it was not that the religion of Israel asserted what 
other religions denied, but that Israel proclaimed clearly and with 
increasing certainty a truth which the highest contemporary reli- 
gions were struggling to express. In the religion of Israel the 
pre-Christian world rose to articulate religious utterance. Its 
highest and truest intuitions found a voice. Israel had yet much 
to learn and much to unlearn as to what true morality is. It had 
anthropomorphisms of thought and language to get rid of. It had 
to rise in Psalmist and Prophet to moral heights unknown to the 
patriarchal age. But the remarkable thing is that the claim is 
made. Morality is claimed for God ; God is declared to be irre- 
vocably on the side of what man knows as righteousness. And this 

1 It is strange that Mr. Darwin should have failed to see that this was 
the answer to his difficulty. It appeared to him, he tells us (Autobiography, 
p. 308), ' utterly incredible that if God were now to make a revelation to the 
Hindoos, he would permit it to be connected with the belief in Vishnu, 
Siva, etc., as Christianitv is connected with the Old Testament.' Incredible, 
no doubt. But why ? For the very reason which makes it ' incredible ' that 
man should be evolved directly from a fish, as Anaximander is said to have 
taught, and not incredible that he should be evolved, as Darwin teaches, 
from one of the higher vertebrates. The very idea of development, whether 
in species or religions, implies a law and order in the development. 

2 St. Athan., De Incarn., c. xii. 



6o The Religion of the Incarnation. 

truth is proclaimed not as a discovery but as a revelation from God 
Himself. It was this, not less than the proclamation of mono- 
theism, which made the teaching of the Old Testament what it 
was. It consciously transformed the natural law of ' might is 
right ' into the moral truth that ' right is might.' 

And the consequences of this new departure in the religious 
history of man were far-reaching. It made the difference between 
the religion of Israel and all other religions a difference not merely 
of degree but of kind. The worship of the Lord and the worship 
of the heathen gods becomes not only a conflict between the true 
and the false in religion, but between the moral and the immoral 
in practice. More than this, it changes the mere emotional feeling 
of awe and dependence on invisible powers into trust and confi- 
dence. If God is irrevocably on the side of right, the nation or 
the individual that is struggling for the right is fighting on the 
side of God. It was this which made the great Hebrew leaders, 
and the Psalmists after them, take it for granted that their cause 
was the cause of God, and that the Lord of Hosts was with' them. 
Even the wars of extermination were the expression in act of the 
utter antagonism between good and evil, the cause of God and 
that of His enemies. And when Saul spared Agag it was from 
no excess of charity, no glimpse of a higher morality ; it was an 
act of moral weakness. Finally, this claim of morality for God 
precluded the possibility of such a collision as took place in the 
history of the Greeks. The progressive development of morals 
in the Old Testament, and the gradual unfolding of a perfect 
character 1 was also for Israel a progressive revelation of the 
character of God. Step by step the religious idea advanced with 
moral progress. And, as they advance, the contrast with other 
religions becomes more marked. ' It was the final distinction 
between Polytheism and the religion of Israel that the former 
emphasized power, the latter the moral element to which it subor- 
dinated and conjoined power.' 2 And this moral conception of 
God was constantly kept before the people. If they lapse into 
idolatry and adopt heathen practices and heathen ideas of God, 
the prophets are ready with the warning that God is the God of 
Israel only because Israel is a chosen people to bear His name 
and His truth before the world ; and if they are false to their 
mission, they will be rejected. If, again, the sacrificial system 
loses its moral significance as the recognition of the holiness of 

1 It is needless to say that this section is largely indebted to Dean Church's 
Discipline of the Christian Character. 

2 Edinb. Rev., Apr., 1888, p. 512. 



ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 61 

God and the sinfulness of the sinner, and the forward -pointing 
look towards the great moral fact of the Atonement, and becomes 
merely ritual, and perfunctory, and formal, the prophets dare to 
denounce even the divinely ordered sacrifices as things which God 
hates. 

Yet it was not that, in the religion of Israel, morality was made 
the essential thing, a nucleus of morals, as it were, with a halo of 
religious emotion round it. It was that the religious and the , 
moral consciousness are brought together in a real unity. To love 1 
the Lord is to hate evil. God is One Who gives His blessing to 
the righteous, while the ungodly and him that delighteth in wicked- 
ness doth His soul abhor. He, then, who would ascend into the 
hill of the Lord and stand in His holy place, must have clean 
hands, and a pure heart, and a lowly mind. The Lord God is 
holy. He- has no pleasure in wickedness, neither shall any evil 
dwell with Him. Righteousness and judgment are the habitation 
of His seat. The sacrifice that He loves is the sacrifice of right- 
eousness. He is to be worshipped in the beauty of holiness. 
What He requires of man is that he shall do justly, and love mercy, 
and walk humbly with his God. 

All this, which comes out no doubt with increasing clearness in 
the Psalms and Prophets, is already implicit in that earlier claim 
made by the religion of Israel, that the true God is on the side of 
righteousness, and that to be false to righteousness is to be a trai- 
tor to God. In this union of religion and morality neither is sacri- 
ficed to the other. Each gains from its union with the other. 
The religious idea of God, and the religious emotions which 
gather round it, are progressively purified with the growth of moral 
ideas ; and morality receives new life and strength when the moral 
law is seen to be the unfolding of the character of a Righteous 
God, and moral evil is known as ' sin ' against a Personal Being. 
The earnest moral protest which in Greece was directed against 
the national religion, is found in the Old Testament making com- 
mon cause with the national religion against the immoral beliefs of 
heathenism. Hence the Jew was not called upon, as the Greek 
was, to choose between his religion and his conscience. He never 
felt the strain which men feel in the present day when a high and 
pure morality seems ranged against religious faith. For the Jew 
every advance in moral insight purified, while it justified, that idea 
of God, which he believed had come down to him from the 
' Father of the Faithful.' His hope of immortality, his faith in the 
ultimate triumph of the God of Israel, were alike based upon 
the conviction that God is a God of justice and mercy, and that the 



62 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

Righteous One could not fail His people, or suffer His holy One to 
see corruption. Even though with the growth of morality, and the 
fuller unfolding of the character of God, there came, like a shadow 
cast by light, the deepening consciousness of sin as the barrier 
between man and God, the Jew refused to believe that the separa- 
tion was forever. Sin was a disease which needed healing, a bond- 
age which called for a deliverer, a state of indebtedness from which 
man could not free himself. But Israel believed in and looked for- 
ward to, with confidence and hope, the Redeemer who should 
come to Zion and save His people from their sins. 

The final revelation of Christianity came outwardly as a contin- 
uation and development of the religion of Israel, and claimed to 
be the fulfilment of Israel's hope. It was a ' republication ' of the 
highest truth about God which had been realized hitherto. For it 
came ' not to destroy, but to fulfil.' God is still the Eternally One, 
the Eternally Righteous. Not sacrifice, but holiness, not external 
' works,' but inward ' faith,' not the deeds of the law, but the 
righteousness which is of God, — this is what He requires. He 
is still the God of Israel. But Israel according to the flesh had 
ceased to be the Israel of God, and the children of faithful Abra- 
ham, in whom, according to the ancient promise, all the families 
of the earth should be blessed, are to be gathered from east and 
west, and north and south, from circumcised and uncircumcised, 
barbarian, Scythian, bond or free, and recognized as one family 
under the one Father. If Christianity had been this and this 
only, Christ might have claimed to be a great prophet, breaking 
. the silence of 400 years, restoring the ancient faith, and truly 
interpreting and carrying forward the spirit of the ancient revela- 
tion. But He claimed to be more than this. He claimed, as the 
Son of God, to be not only the true, but the only Revealer of the 
Father. For ' no man knoweth the Father but the Son, and he to 
whom the Son shall reveal Him.' What fresh characteristics, then, 
has this new revelation to add to the Old Testament teaching 
about God? He is still One, the only God. He is perfect 
Righteousness, yet as even the older religion knew, a God of 
lovingkindness and tender mercy, ' Who wills not the death of 
the sinner.' But more than all this, He is now revealed to man 
as Infinite Love, the One Father of humanity, Whose only be- 
gotten Son is Incarnate and < made man that we may be made 
God.' Not one jot or tittle of the old revelation of God, as a 
God of Righteousness, is lost or cancelled. The moral teaching is 
stern and uncompromising as ever. God's love, which is Himself, 
is not the invertebrate amiability, or weak good-naturedness to 



ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 63 

which some would reduce it. ' The highest righteousness of the 
Old Testament is raised to the completeness of the Sermon on the 
Mount.' 1 'The New Testament,' it has been said, 'with all its 
glad tidings of mercy, is a severe book.' 2 For the goodness and 
the severity of God are, as it were, the convex and the concave in 
His moral nature. But what seized upon the imagination of man- 
kind as the distinctive revelation of Christianity was the infinite 
love and tenderness and compassion of this Righteous God for 
sinful man. It was this which shone out in the character of 
Christ. He was Very God, with a Divine hatred of evil, yet living 
as man among men, revealing the true idea of God, and not only 
realizing in His human life the moral ideal of man, but by taking 
human nature into Himself setting loose a power of moral regene- 
ration, of which the world had never dreamed. 

The advance which the Gospel of Christ makes upon the Old 
Testament revelation consists, then, not only in the new truth it 
teaches as to the character of God, but in the new relation which 
it establishes between God and man. So soon as men learn the 
Old Testament truth that God is eternally on the side of righteous- 
ness, the awe and cringing fear which lie behind heathen reli- 
gions, and justify us in calling them superstitions, give place to 
trustful confidence, which deepens into faith, and gathers round it 
those affections and desires for union with God which find expres- 
sion in the book of Psalms. The saints of the Old Testament 
could ' rest in the Lord ' and wait for the vindication of His 
Righteousness in human life ; they could yearn for His presence 
and hope for the day when they should 'see the King in His 
beauty.' But they were yet separated \rom Him by the unoblit- 
erated fact of sin. Enoch ' walked with God/ Abraham was 
called ' the friend of God,' Moses ' the Lord knew face to face,' 
David was ' a man after God's own heart,' Daniel ' a man greatly 
beloved.' But one and all of these fell short, and necessarily fell 
short, of the closeness of that union which is the Christian's birth- 
right. In the Gospel, God is revealed as one with man. And 
this truth changed the whole attitude and atmosphere of worship. 
There was worship still, for humanity was not merged and lost in 
Godhead. There is no Christian ring about the statement 3 that 
' in Christianity, in the consciousness that he is partaker of the 
Divine existence, man no longer sustains the relation of Depend- 
ence, but of Love.' Rather the antithesis between dependence 

1 Discipline of the Christian Character, p. 85. 2 Ibid., p. 87. 

3 Hegel, Phil, of Hist., p. 247, Eng. tr. 



64 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

and freedom is destroyed. As perfect love casts out fear, yet 
leaves reverence, so the consciousness of union with God, as dis- 
tinct from absorption in Him, while it destroys the last remnant 
of what is servile and degrading in religious emotion, and gives 
man freedom, yet gives the freedom of loving dependence upon 
God. And by this gift it sets free new affections and appeals to 
new motives. It was the assured consciousness of union with 
God which gave the first Christians their power in the great moral 
struggles of their day. Their moral ideal, with its loftiness, its 
purity, its perfect truthfulness, would by its very perfectness have 
paralyzed effort, had they not believed that they were one with 
Him Who had not only proclaimed but realized it, that they could 
do all things through Christ which strengthened them. And the 
horror of sin, which was a characteristic note of Christian ethics, 
was due to the same fact. Unrighteousness not only, as under 
the Old Testament, ranged a man on the side of the enemies of 
God, but according to its degree tended to break the supernatural 
bond which through the Incarnation united men with God. Im- 
purity, which meant so little for the civilized world of the first 
Christian centuries, was for the Christian not defilement only, but 
sacrilege, for his body was God's temple. The love of the world 
was enmity against God ; yet the neglect of social duties, and of all 
that is now summed up in the ' service of man,' was for the Chris- 
tian ipso facto the declaring himself outside the love of God, just 
as, conversely, the love of the brethren was the proof that he had 
* passed from death unto life.' 

Thus in primitive Christianity the religious and the moral con- 
sciousness were at one, as in the Old Testament ; but both are now 
raised to their highest level. Free scope is given for the develop- 
ment of both and the satisfaction of the demands of both, in Chris- 
tian life and Christian worship. Side by side they fought and 
triumphed over heathenism, taking up and assimilating all that was 
best and truest in non-Christian ethics. And though Christians 
were long in learning what manner of spirit they were of, it seemed 
as if a real conflict between religion and morals, within the area 
of Christianity, was impossible. 

And yet again and again, in the history of Christianity, such a 
conflict has come about. Every moral reformation within the 
Church was a protest of the conscience against unworthy views of 
God ; every new Order that was founded was a nursery of moral 
reformation. Yet every protest against formalism and unreality in 
religion, every attack on ecclesiasticism and 'priestcraft' in the 
Church, or on worldliness and laxity in professing Christians, owed 



ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 6$ 

its strength to the reassertion of the truth, that in the Christian idea 
religion and morals are inseparably united. The moral reformer 
always claimed Christianity on his side when attacking the Chris- 
tianity of his day. This was conspicuously so in the great moral 
upheaval of the sixteenth century. In actual fact religion and 
morality had separated. And the nearer one got to the centre of 
Western Christendom, the more open and unabashed the neglect 
of morality was. In Italy of the fifteenth century renaissance we 
see, in strange confusion, ' all that we love in art, and all that we 
loathe in man.' 1 It seemed as if, as in the old riddle, a swarm 
of bees had settled in the dead lion's carcass, and there was sweet- 
ness instead of strength, corruption where once was life. When the 
new century opened, Borgia was the supreme Bishop of the West, 
and the strength of the protest of Christianity against immorality 
may be gathered from the list of prices to be paid to the pardoner. 
The devout retired from the contest into the severer discipline of 
the monastic life, and hoped against hope for the days of a Papa 
angelkus, who never came. Yet when the strained relations of 
religion and morals resulted in a revolution, it never occurred to 
those, who had a moral reformation at heart, to say that religion 
was outgrown, and morality must henceforth take its place. They 
appealed from the Christianity of the sixteenth century to the 
Christianity of Christ. Even of those who, in their fear of popery, 
broke away farthest from the Christian idea of God, all, if we 
except the Anabaptists, claimed the Bible on their side. It was 
a genuine moral revolt against a religion which had come to tol- 
erate immorality. The hatred of ' ecclesiasticism ' and ' sacerdotal- 
ism ' was not at first a rejection of the Church and the Priesthood, 
but a protest against anything which, under the sacred name of 
religion, becomes a cover for unreality, or makes sin a thing easy 
to be atoned for. The Reformation was a moral protest, and its 
results were seen within as well as outside the Roman communion. 
The Council of Trent was a reforming Council ; the Jesuits were 
the children of the Reformation ; and Roman Christianity, in the 
strength of its own moral revival, even in the moment of defeat 
became again ' a conquering power.' 2 

On the other hand, those whose first impulse was a protest in 
favor of a moral religion and a belief in a God who hates ini- 
quity, have bequeathed to the world a legacy of immorality of 
which they never dreamt, and of which we, in the present day, 
are feeling the full effects. Lutheranism starts with the belief 

1 Cont. Rev., Oct., 1878, p. 645. 2 Ranke, Popes, i. 395. 

S 



66 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

that God is love; Calvinism with the conception of God as 
power. With the former, the desire, at all costs, to guard the belief 
in the freedom of God's grace led to a morbid fear of righteous- 
ness, as if it were somehow a rival to faith. With the latter, 
a one-sided view of the power of God gradually obscured the 
fact that righteousness and justice eternally condition its exercise. 
If the one was, as history shows us, in constant danger of Antino- 
mian developments, the other struck at the root of morality by 
making God Himself unjust. Forensic fictions of substitution, 
immoral theories of the Atonement, ' the rending asunder of the 
Trinity,' and the opposing of the Divine Persons, like parties in 
a lawsuit, 1 were the natural corollaries of a theory which taught 
that God was above morality, and man beneath it. 

How deeply these false views of God have influenced Eng- 
lish religious thought is shown by the fact that every attack on 
the moral as distinguished from the intellectual position of 
Christianity, is demonstrably an attack on that which is not 
Christianity, but a mediaeval or modern perversion of it. J. S. 
Mill's well-known words, 2 ■ I will call no being good who is not 
what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow-creatures/ 
was a noble assertion of ' immutable morality ' against a religion 
which, alas ! he mistook for Christianity. The conscience of 
to-day — and it is a real gain that it should be so — refuses to 
believe that the imprimatur of religion can be given to that 
which is not good, or that God would put us to moral confu- 
sion. It would rather give up religion altogether than accept 
one which will not indorse and advance our highest moral 
ideas. 

But men do not always stop to make the necessary distinc- 
tions. On the one side they see a traditional view of religion 
which they cannot harmonize with the highest morality ; on the 
other they see a morality, which, though it has grown up under 
the shadow and shelter of religion, seems strong enough to stand 
alone. And their first thought is, 'Away with religion. We 
have outgrown it. Henceforward we will have morals unencum- 
bered by religion.' What would be the effect on the morals of 
a nation of thus renouncing the/ .religious sanction, it is not safe 
to predict. In individuals certainly it sometimes has disastrous 
results. But there is one thing which those who talk about the 
' secularization of morals ' 3 seldom take into account, and that is 

1 Dollinger, The Church and the Churches, p. 239. 

2 Examination of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy, p. 103. 

3 H. Spencer, Data of Ethics, pref. 



II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 67 

the effect on what, in contrast to morals, they call religion. The 
religious consciousness always refuses to be treated as defunct, and 
the religious emotions, if they no longer find their object in a God 
of Righteousness, and are no longer controlled by morality, will 
not be satisfied with the worship of the Unknowable or of ideal- 
ized humanity, but will avenge themselves, as they have done again 
and again, in superstition. 1 

And the attempt to do without religion in morals is as unphiloso- 
phical as it is dangerous. It is parallel to what, in the region of 
morality proper, we all recognize as a false asceticism. It is the 
attempt to crush out, rather than to purify. When men realize the 
danger of giving the rein to the animal passions, there are always 
to be found moralists who will treat these passions as in themselves 
evil, and advocate the suppression of them. And only after an 
antinomian revolt against that false teaching do men realize that 
morality is not the destruction, but the purification and regulation of 
the passions. So with religion and the religious emotions. The func- 
tion of morality is to purify the religious idea of God ; and religion 
and morality are strong and true in proportion as each uses the 
help of the other. But neither can treat the other as subordinate. 
God is more than what Kant makes Him, — the ultimate justification 
of morality ; morality is more than what some religious people 
would have it, — obedience to the positive commands of even God 
Himself. In experience we find them separate and even opposed ; 
ideally they are one ; united, not confused. Separated, religion 
tends to become superstitious ; morality to degenerate into a mere 
prudentialism, or at least an expanded utilitarianism. United, reli- 
gion gives to right that absolute character which makes it defiant of 
consequences ; morality safeguards the idea of God from aught 
that is unworthy of the worship of moral beings. 

As the result of all the conflicts which have raged round the idea 
of God so far as morals are concerned, one truth has burned itself 
into the consciousness of both the apologists and opponents of reli- 
gion, a truth as old indeed as the religion of Israel, but only slowly 
realized in the course of ages, the truth, namely, that the religious 
idea of God must claim and justify itself to the highest known 
morality ; and no amount of authority, ecclesiastical or civil, will 
make men worship an immoral God. And already that truth has 
thrown back its light upon questions of Old Testament morality. 

1 See Ihne's remarks on the separation of morals and religion in Rome at 
the time of the Punic wars. 'The religious cravings were not satisfied, and 
men were carried either to the schools of Greek philosophy or to the grossest 
and meanest superstition.' — Hist, of Rome, ii. 477, 478. 



68 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

We no longer say, * It is in the Bible, approved or allowed by God, 
and therefore it must be right.' It was this view which, in every 
age, has given its protection to religious wars and intolerance and 
persecution. But we look back and see in the perspective of his- 
tory how God in every age takes man as he is that He may make 
him what he is not. We see in the Old Testament not only the 
revelation of the Righteousness of God, but the record of the way 
in which, in spite of waywardness and disobedience, He raised His 
people to the knowledge of the truth. 

VI. But the religious idea of God in our day, as in former ages, 
is challenged not only by conscience, but by the speculative reason. 
And there is a close parallelism between the two conflicts. When 
religion and morals are opposed, men naturally say, ' Give us mor- 
als ; away with religion.' And the answer is : ' True religion is 
moral : that which is not moral is not true ; and morality without 
religion will not only leave the religious consciousness unsatisfied, 
but fall short of its own true perfection.' So when religion and 
philosophy are opposed, men say once more, ' Give us reason ; 
away with religion.' And the answer again is : ' True religion is 
rational : if it excludes reason, it is self-condemned.' And reason 
without religion fails of its object, since, if philosophy can find no 
place for religion, it cannot explain man. 

But here again nothing is gained by confusing the issue, or deny- 
ing the actual fact of the collision. We may say, with Lacordaire, 
1 God is the proper name of truth, as truth is the abstract name of 
God.' But it is not a matter of indifference from which point we 
start, whether with religion we approach God first as a moral Being, 
or with philosophy seek for Him as the truth of man and nature. 
The motto of Oxford University, Dominus Illuminatio mea, alto- 
gether changes its meaning if we read it Illuminatio Dominus mens. 
As Reville says, 'A religion may become philosophical, but no 
philosophy has ever founded a religion possessing real historical 
power.' L And it is a fact patent to the observation of all, that it 
is easier to make religion philosophical than to make philosophy in 
any real sense religious. The reason of this is obvious. Religion 
is not only first in the field, it covers the whole ground before 
either morals or science have attained their full development, or 
even emerged into conscious life. But when we speak of philoso- 
phy, we have reached a stage in which the reason has already 
separated itself from, and set itself over against, the religious con- 
sciousness, and must either absorb religion into itself (in which case 

1 History of Religions, p. 22. 



II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 69 

religion ceases to be religion) , or must leave religion outside, though 
it may borrow and appropriate religious terms. If, then, the idea 
of God is to appeal to both the religious consciousness and the 
speculative reason, it must be by claiming philosophy for religion, 
not by claiming religion for philosophy. It is from within, not 
from without, that religion must be defended. 

In Greece the traditional polytheism was challenged, as we have 
seen, at once on the side both of morals and metaphysics. To 
Xenophanes, indeed, the unity of God is even more essential than 
His morality, and the attack on anthropomorphism is as much an 
attack upon the number of the gods of Hesiod as upon the im- 
moral character attributed to them. In the unity, however, which 
Xenophanes contends for, the religious idea of God is so atten- 
uated that we hardly know whether the One God is a person, or 
an abstraction. Indeed, it is hard to see how a champion of 
Eleaticism could consistently have held the personality of God, as 
we understand it, without falling under his own charge of an- 
thropomorphism. In Plato the same difficulty appears, only 
complicated or relieved by the fact that while from the moral side 
he talks like a theist, from the metaphysical his teaching is pan- 
theistic. Is the 'Idea of God' personal? Is it a God we can 
love and worship, or only a God we can talk about ? Is the vision 
of Er a concession to popular views, or the vehicle of moral and 
religious truth ? The question is hardly more easy to decide with 
regard to Aristotle. The religious atmosphere, which lingers on 
in Plato, has disappeared. What of the religious belief? Did 
Aristotle in any intelligible sense hold the personality of God? 
Great names are ranged on both sides of the mediaeval con- 
troversy. Who shall decide? But whether or no anything of 
religion survived in philosophy, it was not strong enough to with- 
stand the attack of the moral and the speculative reason, still less 
to claim these as its own. It is not on the side of religion, but of 
speculation, that we are debtors to the Greeks. 

Among the Jews, on the other hand, speculation seems hardly 
to have existed. Religion was satisfied to make good her claim 
to the region of morals. God was One, and He was Righteous ; 
but the mystery which enveloped His nature the Old Testament 
does not attempt to fathom. ' Clouds and darkness are round 
about Him,' yet out of the thick darkness comes the clear, un- 
faltering truth that ' Righteousness and judgment are the habitation 
of His seat.' Jewish religion and Greek speculation had little 
contact, and less kinship, till the best days of both were passed. 
But in the days of the dispersion we get the beginning of the 



yo The Religion of the Incarnation. 

mingling of those streams which were only united under the higher 
unity of Christianity. ' With the Jews of the East/ it has been 
said, ' rested the future of Judaism; with them of the West, in a 
sense, that of the world. The one represented old Israel, groping 
back into the darkness of the past ; the other young Israel, stretch- 
ing forth its hands to where the dawn of a new day was about to 
break.' x The Septuagint translation threw open to the Greek 
world the sacred books of Israel. The Apocrypha, with all its 
glorification of Judaism, was both an apology and an eirenicon. 2 
It seemed as if in Wisdom personified might be found a middle 
term between the religion of Israel and the philosophy of Greece, 
and the life of righteousness might be identified with the life of 
true wisdom. The Jews of Alexandria were thus willing to find a 
strain of truth in Greek philosophy, and Alexandrian Greeks were 
found ready ' to spiritualize their sensuous divinities.' 3 But the 
result was a compromise, in which the distinctive elements of each 
were not harmonized, but lost. There was no fusion as yet of 
Jewish and Greek thought, only each was learning to understand 
the other, and unconsciously preparing for the higher synthesis of 
Christianity. 

Whether we think of Christ as the ' Son of Man' or as the Re- 
vealer of God, Christianity is bound to transcend national distinc- 
tions, and to claim not only the whole of humanity, but the whole 
of man, his reason no less than his heart and will. And this 
Christ did in a special way. He not only speaks of Himself as 
'the Truth,' and as having come 'to bear witness to the Truth,' 
but the very complement (if we may say so) of His revelation of 
the Father, was the sending ' the Spirit of Truth/ who should teach 
His disciples all things. This possession of ' truth ' is always 
spoken of by Christ as a future thing, implicit indeed in Himself, 
Who is the Truth, but only to be explicitly declared and brought 
to remembrance when the Spirit of Truth should come. He was 
to guide them ' into all truth.' ' Ye shall know the truth, and the 
truth shall make you free.' It was inevitable, then, that the ques- 
tion should arise, — Will this religion, which has broken through 
the narrowness of Judaism, and yet by its belief in a God of right- 
eousness and love combated and triumphed over heathen immoral- 
ity, have the power to assimilate and absorb the philosophy of 
Greece ? The great crisis in the world's history, as we see it, look- 
ing back from the security of eighteen centuries, was this : Will 

1 Edersheim, Life and Times, i. 17. 

2 See Edersheim, i. 31, etc. 

3 Hegel, Philosophy of History, p. 343, Eng. tr. 



ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. 71 

Christianity, with all its moral triumphs, become a tributary to 
Greek philosophy, as represented by the schools of Alexandria, or 
will it claim and transform the rational, as it has transformed the 
moral, progress of humanity? The answer of Christianity is un- 
hesitating. Christianity is truth, and there is only one truth. 
Christianity is wisdom, and there is only one wisdom ; for the wis- 
dom of the world is not wisdom, but folly. And at once the rival 
claim is made. Why not a division of territory? Knowledge for 
the philosopher ; faith for the Christian. The Gnostics taught, as 
a modern philosopher teaches, that religion is 'reason talking 
naively,' and that, good as it is for ordinary people, the Gnostic 
can afford to do without it. Every one knows the answer of the 
Apostles to the insidious suggestions of Gnosticism. To St. Peter 
it is ' a damnable heresy, even denying the Lord Who bought us.' 1 
To St. Paul it is the ' science falsely so called ; ' 2 the ' knowledge 
which puffs up;' 3 the 'wisdom of this world.' 4 To St. John, 
Cerinthus was 'the enemy of the truth.' 5 To St. Polycarp, Mar- 
cion is ' the first-born of Satan.' It never occurred to the Apostles, 
or the Apologists after them, to retreat into the fastnesses of a 
reasonless faith. For with them faith was implicit knowledge, and 
the only knowledge that was true. 

It was the collision of Christianity with Greek thought which 
gave rise to Christian theology in the strict sense of the term. Its 
necessity was the claiming of Greek as well as Jew ; its justification 
was the belief in the presence of the Spirit of truth ; its impulse the 
desire ' to know the things which are freely given to us by God.' 6 
The first Christians were not theologians. They were ' unlearned 
and ignorant men.' When Christ preached, the common people 
heard Him gladly, the publicans and the harlots believed Him, the 
poor found in His teaching ' good news,' and a few fishermen 
devoted their lives to Him. But the Scribes and Pharisees stood 
aloof; and the rationalistic Sadducees asked Him captious ques- 
tions ; and the Herodians, the Erastians of the day, tried to involve 
Him with the secular power. It was only when challenged by an 
earnest, but non-religious philosophy, that reason came forward, in 
the strength of the Spirit of truth, to interpret to itself and to the 
world the revelation of Christ. Religion and theology in different 
ways have to do with the knowledge of God and of spiritual truth. 
They have the same object, God, but their aims and their methods 
are different. Religion knows God ; theology is concerned with 

1 2 St. Pet. ii. 1. 2 1 Tim. vi. 20. 8 1 Cor. viii. 6. 

4 I Cor. iii. 19. 5 Euseb. iii. 28. 6 1 Cor. ii. 12. 



72 The Religion of the Incarnation, 

the idea of God. Religion sees ; theology thinks. Religion begins 
and ends in an almost instinctive attitude of worship ; theology 
rationalizes and defines the characteristics of the Object of worship. 
As reason seeks to interpret feeling, so theology interprets religion. 
It makes explicit what is implicit in religion. ' As the intellect is 
cultivated and expanded, it cannot refrain from the attempt to 
analyze the vision which influences the heart, and the object in 
which it centres ; nor does it stop till it has, in some sort, suc- 
ceeded in expressing in words, what has all along been a principle 
both of the affections and of practical obedience.' * It takes the 
facts which the religious consciousness has seized, seeks to bring 
them into distinctness before the mental vision, to connect them 
with one another in a coherent system, and find in them the explan- 
ation and unity of all that is. Christian theology grows naturally 
out of the Christian religion. But religion is a divine life ; theol- 
ogy a divine science. 

This explains the fact that though both religion and theology 
have to do with the knowledge of God, and ideally work in per- 
fect harmony, yet they are often found opposed. Theology is 
always in danger of becoming unreal. What is an interpretation 
for one age becomes a tongue not understanded ' in the next. 
Hence when a revival of religious life comes, it frequently shows 
itself in an attack on the received theology. Theology is no 
longer regarded as the scientific expression of the very truths 
which religion values ; it is conceived of as the antithesis of 
religion, and reformers dream of a new theology which shall be 
for them what, though they know it not, the old theology was to 
their predecessors, the handmaid and guardian of religious truth. 
When Martin Luther said that ' an old woman who reads her Bible 
in the chimney-corner knows more about God than the great 
doctors of theology,' he was emphasizing the severance which in 
his day had come to exist between a religious life and theological 
orthodoxy. And when in his ' Table Talk ' he says, ' A jurist may 
be a rogue, but a theologian must be a man of piety,' he touches 
a real truth. A hundred years later, amid the confusions and 
unrealities of the seventeenth century, John Smith, 2 the Cambridge 
Platonist, said the same. ' They are not always the best skilled in 
divinity,' he says, ' that are most studied in those pandects into 
which it is sometimes digested.' ' Were I to define divinity, I 
should rather call it a divine life than a divine science.'' Techni- 

1 Newman's Arians, ch. ii. § i. 

2 Natural Truth of Christianity, §§ I, 2. 



II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 73 

cally, no doubt, he was wrong, for theology is a science, and not a 
life ; but, like Luther, he was vindicating the truth that it is possible 
for quite simple people to know God, though they have no knowl- 
edge of theology, and that theology, when it becomes speculative 
and abstract, ceases to be theology. A theologian, as Mazzini says 
of an artist, ' must be a high-priest or a charlatan.' 

But the world dislikes a high-priest, and good people dislike a 
charlatan. And the consequence is that theology, ancient or mod- 
ern, is attacked from two very different points of view, by those 
who look upon it as the antithesis of 'the simple Gospel,' and 
by those who approach it from the side of speculative thought. 
Theology claims to be a divine science. Religious people attack 
it because it is a science ; philosophers because it claims to be 
divine. To the former, religion expressed in rational terms ceases 
to be religion ; to the latter, that science is no science which 
claims for itself unique conditions. Yet St. Paul seems to recognize 
both the necessity and the uniqueness of theology when he says 
to the Greeks of Corinth, 'We received not the spirit of the 
world, but the spirit which is of God, that we might know the 
things that are freely given us by God.' 

It is the relation of Christian theology to philosophy and science 
with which we are specially concerned. But it is impossible to 
pass by the objection to theology which comes as it were ab i?itra 
from the side of religion. For if it is valid, then Christianity may 
as well give up at once any idea of being the religion of man. 
Yet people say, 'Why have a theology? Human reason cannot 
search out " the deep things of God ; " it will only put new difficul- 
ties in a brother's way : why not rest content with the words of 
Holy Scripture, with simple truths like " God is love," and simple 
duties like " Love one another," and leave theology alone ? ? Now, 
without denying what George Eliot calls 'the right of the indi- 
vidual to general haziness,' or asserting that every Christian must 
be a theologian, we may surely say that Christianity is bound to 
have a theology. And even individual Christians, if they ever 
grow into the manhood of reason, must have a theology or cease 
to be religious. The protest against theology from the side of 
religion looks modest and charitable enough till we remember that 
religious haziness is generally, if not always, the outcome of moral 
laziness ; that it implies the neglect of a duty and the neglect of a 
gift, — the duty of realizing to the reason the revelation of Christ, 
and the gift of the Spirit of Truth to enable us to do it. More 
than this, the protest against theology in the interests of religion is 
irrational and suicidal. To tell a thinking man that he need not 



74 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

interpret to his reason what religion tells him of God, is like saying 
to him, ' Be religious if you will, but you need not let your re- 
ligion influence your conduct.' If Christianity had been content 
to be a moral religion, if it had abandoned its claim to rationality 
and had left Greek speculation alone, it must have accepted either 
the Gnostic division of territory, or recognized an internecine 
conflict between religion and philosophy. And it did neither ; but, 
under the guidance of the Spirit of Truth, Christian theology arose 
and claimed the reason of the ancient world. 

Thus as the religion of the Old Testament claims morality for 
God, so Christianity goes farther and claims to hold the key to the 
intellectual problems of the world. So far as the nature of God is 
concerned, Christianity met the intellectual difficulties of the first 
centuries by the Doctrine of the Trinity. 

From time to time people make the discovery that the doctrine 
of the Trinity is older than Christianity. If the discoverer is a 
Christian apologist, he usually explains that God has given antici- 
patory revelations to men of old, and points out how they fall 
short of the revelation of Christianity. If he is an opponent of 
Christianity, he triumphantly claims to have unmasked the doctrine 
and tracked it down to a purely natural origin. ' People think,' 
says Hegel, ' that by pronouncing a doctrine to be Neo-Platonic, 
they have ipso facto banished it from Christianity.' * Men have 
found the doctrine, or something like it, not only in the Old Tes- 
tament, but in Plato and Neo-Platonism, and among the Ophite 
Gnostics, in the Chinese Tao-T^-Ching and the { Three Holy 
Ones ' of Bouddhism, in the Tri-murti of Hinduism, and else- 
where. Why not ? Revelation never advances for itself the claim 
which its apologists sometimes make for it, — the claim to be some- 
thing absolutely new. A truth revealed by God is never a truth out 
of relation with previous thought. He leads men to feel their 
moral and intellectual needs before He satisfies either. There 
was a preparation for Hebrew monotheism, as there was a prepara- 
tion for the Gospel of Christ. There was an intellectual prepara- 
tion for the doctrine of the Trinity, as there was a moral preparation 
for the doctrine of the Incarnation. If the Christian doctrine of 
the Incarnation is distinguished from the avatars of Hinduism, 
and the incarnations of Thibetan Lamaism, by its regenerative moral 
force, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is no less distinguished 
from the pseudo-trinities of Neo-Platonism and its modern devel- 
opments by the fact that for eighteen centuries it has been the 

1 Phil, of Hist., p. 343, Eng. tr. 



II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 75 

safeguard of a pure Monotheism against everything which menaces 
the life of religion. 

But Christian theology is not " a philosophy without assump- 
tions." It does not attempt to prove sola ratione the doctrine of 
the Trinity, but to show how that which reason demands is met 
and satisfied by the Christian doctrine of God. Starting with the 
inheritance of faith, the belief in the Divinity of Christ, and trust- 
ing in the guidance of the Spirit of Truth, it throws itself boldly 
into the rational problem, fights its way through every form of 
Unitarianism, and interprets its faith to itself and to the world 
at large in the doctrine of the Triune God. Its charter is the 
formula of Baptism, where the " treasures of immediate faith are 
gathered up into a sentence, though not yet formulated into a 
doctrine." x 

To the Greek mind two things had become clear before Chris- 
tianity came into the world, and it would be easy to trace the 
steps by which the conclusions were reached. First, Reason, as 
relation-giving, seeks for unity in the manifoldness of which it is 
conscious, and will be satisfied with nothing less. But Eleaticism 
had convincingly proved that an abstract unity can explain noth- 
ing. Quite apart from questions of religion and morals, the 
Eleatic unity was metaphysically a failure. Plato had seen this, 
and yet the ' dead hand ' of Eleaticism rested on Platonism, and 
the dialogue Parmenides showed how powerless the Doctrine of 
Ideas was to evade the difficulty. Thus the Greeks more than 
2000 years ago had realized, what is nowadays proclaimed as if 
it were a new discovery, that an absolute unit is unthinkable, 
because, as Plato puts it in the Philebus, the union of the one and 
the many is ' an everlasting quality in thought itself which never 
grows old in us.' The Greeks, like the Jews, had thus had their 
* schoolmaster to bring them to Christ.' They had not solved, 
but they had felt, the rational difficulty ; as the Jews had felt, but 
had not overcome, except through the Messianic hope, the separ- 
ation of man from God. But as the Trinitarian doctrine took 
shape, Christian teachers realized how the Christian, as opposed 
to the Jewish, idea of God, not only held the truth of the Divine 
Unity as against all polytheistic religions, but claimed reason on 
its side against all unitarian theories. They did not, however, 
argue that it was true because it satisfied reason, but that it 
satisfied reason because it was true. 

They started, indeed, not with a metaphysical problem to be 

1 Dorner, Hist, of Doct., i. 362, etc. 



y6 Tlie Religion of the Incarnation. 

solved, but with a historical fact to proclaim, the fact of the 
Resurrection, and a doctrinal truth to maintain, the Divinity of 
Him who rose. And starting from that basis of fact revealed in 
Christ, they found themselves in possession of an answer to diffi- 
culties which at first they had not felt, and thus their belief was 
justified and verified in the speculative region. 

The truth for which they contended, which was enshrined in 
their sacred writings, was that ' the Father is God, the Son is God, 
and the Holy Ghost is God. And yet they are not three Gods, 
but one God.' But the Fathers do not treat this doctrine merely 
as a revealed mystery, still less as something which complicates the 
simple teaching of Monotheism, but as the condition of rationally 
holding the Unity of God. ' The Unity which derives the Trinity 
out of its own self,' says Tertullian, ' so far from being destroyed, 
is actually supported by it.' 1 'We cannot otherwise think of 
One God,' says Hippolytus, ' but by truly believing in Father, and 
Son, and Holy Ghost' 2 'The supreme and only God,' says Lac- 
tantius, ' cannot be worshipped except through the Son. He who 
thinks that he worships the Father only, in that he does not wor- 
ship the Son also, does not worship the Father.' 3 ' Without the 
Son the Father is not,' says Clement of Alexandria, 'for in that 
He is a Father He is the Father of the Son, and the Son is the 
true teacher about the Father,' 4 So Origen argues : If God had 
ever existed alone in simple unity and solitary grandeur, apart from 
some object upon which from all eternity to pour forth His love, 
He could not have been always God. His love, His Father- 
hood, His very omnipotence would have been added in time, 
and there would then have been a time when He was imperfect. 
' The Fatherhood of God must be coeval with His omnipotence ; 
for it is through the Son that the Father is Almighty.' 5 This 
was the line of argument afterwards developed by St. Athana- 
sius when he contended against the Arians, that the Son was the 
reality or truth 6 of the Father, without whom the Father could not 
exist ; and by St. Augustine, when he argues that love implies one 
who loves and one who is loved, and love to bind them together. 7 
Even one so unphilosophically minded as Irenseus 8 cannot but 
see in the Christian doctrine of the relation of the Father and the 
Son the solution of the difficulty about the infinity of God : ' Im- 
mensus Pater in Filio mensuratus ; mensura Patris Filius.' W T hile 

1 Adv. Prax., ch. iii. 5 De Princ, I. ii. § 10. 

2 Cont. Noet., § xiv. 6 Adv. Arianos, i. § 20. 

3 Inst., iv. c. 29. 7 De Trin., viii. 10, and ix. 2. 

4 Strom., v. 1. 8 Iren., Adv. Hzer., IV. iv. 1, 2. 



ii. The Christian Doctrme of God. 77 

philosophy, with increasing hopelessness, was asking, How can we 
have a real unity which shall be not a barren and dead unity, but 
shall include differences? Christianity, with its doctrine of God, 
was arguing that that which was an unsolved contradiction for 
non-Christian thought, was a necessary corollary of the Christian 
Faith. 1 

The other truth which Greek thought had realized was the 
immanence of reason in nature and in man. When Anaxagoras 
first declared that the universe was the work of intelligence, we are 
told that he seemed Mike a sober man among random talkers.' 
But both Plato and Aristotle accuse him of losing the truth which 
he had gained, because he made intelligence appear only on occa- 
sions in the world, dragged in, like a stage-god, when naturalistic 
explanations failed. 2 The conception of creation out of nothing 
was of course unknown to Anaxagoras. Intelligence is only the 
arranger of materials already given in a chaotic condition. With 
Aristotle, too, it is reason which makes everything what it is. But 
the reason is in things, not outside them. Nature is rational from 
end to end. In spite of failures and mistakes, due to her mate- 
rials, nature does the best she can and always aims at a good end. 3 
She works like an artist with an ideal in view. 4 Only there is this 
marked difference : Nature has the principle of growth within 
herself, while the artist is external to his materials. 5 Here we have 
a clear and consistent statement of the doctrine of immanent 
reason as against the Anaxagorean doctrine of a transcendent 
intelligence. If we translate both into the theological language of 
our own day, we should call the latter the rieistic, the former the 
pantheistic, view ; or, adopting a distinction of supreme impor- 
tance in the history of science, we might say that we have here, 
face to face, the mechanical and the organic view of nature. Both 
were teleological ; but to the one reason was an extra-mundane 
cause, to the other an internal principle. It was the contrast 
between external and inner design, as we know it in Kant and 
Hegel ; between the teleology of Paley and the ' wider teleology ' 
of Darwin, and Huxley, and Fiske ; between the transcendent and 
immanent views of God, when so held as to be mutually exclusive. 

It is these two one-sided views which the Christian doctrine 
of God brings together. Religion demands as the very condition 
of its existence a God who transcends the universe ; philosophy 
as imperiously requires His immanence in nature. If either 

1 Cf. pp. 278-281. 2 Plat., Pha?d., 98 B. ; Arist., Met. A., 4. 

3 P. 455 b i7- The references are to the Berlin edition. 

* P. 199*8, 18; 4i5 b i7 ; 73 ia2 4- 5 ?• 1070*7, 1033^8, 753*3. 



7 3 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

Religion denies God's immanence, or Philosophy denies that He 
transcends the universe, there is an absolute antagonism between 
the two which can only be ended by the abandonment of one or 
the other. But what we find is, that though Philosophy (meaning 
by that the exercise of the speculative reason in abstraction from 
morals, and religion), the more fully it realizes the immanence of 
God, the more it tends to deny the transcendence, religion not 
only has no quarrel with the doctrine of immanence, but the 
higher the religion, the more unreservedly it asserts this immanence 
as a truth dear to religion itself. The religious equivalent for 
' immanence ' is ' omnipresence,' and the omnipresence of God is 
a corollary of a true monotheism. As long as any remains of 
dualism exist, there is a region, however small, impervious to the 
Divine power. But the Old Testament doctrine of creation, by 
excluding dualism, implies from the first, if it does not teach, the 
omnipresence of God. For the omnipotence of God underlies 
the doctrine of creation, and omnipotence involves omnipresence. 
Hence we find the Psalmists and Prophets ascribing natural 
processes immediately to God. They know nothing of second 
causes. The main outlines of natural science, the facts of genera- 
tion and growth, are familiar enough to them, yet every fact is 
ascribed immediately to the action of God. He makes the grass 
to grow upon the mountains ; He fashions the child in the womb ; 
He feeds the young ravens ; He provides fodder for the cattle ; 
He gives to all their meat in due season ; when He lets His 
breath go forth, they are made ; when He takes away their breath, 
they die and return to dust. 

This doctrine of the omnipresence of God, as conceived by 
religion, had however yet to be fused with the philosophical doc- 
trine of immanence. And here again the fusion was effected by 
the Christian doctrine of God, as Trinity in Unity. The earlier 
Apologists concern themselves first with the vindication of the 
Divine attributes, — God's separateness from the world as against 
Greek Pantheism, His omnipresence in it as against a Judaizing 
deism. But the union of God's transcendence with His imma- 
nence, and with it the fusion of the religious with the philo- 
sophic idea of God, is only consciously completed by the Doctrine 
of the Trinity. 1 The dying words of Plotinus, expressing as they 
did the problem of his life, are said to have been: 'I am 
striving to bring the God which is within into harmony with the 
God which is in the universe.' And the unsolved problem of 

1 Dorner, Hist, of Doct., i. 366. 



it. The Christian Doctrine of God. 79 

Neo-Platonism, which is also the unsolved problem of non-Chris- 
tian philosophy in our day, is met by the Christian doctrine of 
God. All and more than all that philosophy and science can 
demand, as to the immanence of reason in the universe, and the 
rational coherence of all its parts, is included in the Christian 
teaching : nothing which religion requires as to God's separateness 
from the world, which He has made, is left unsatisfied. The old 
familiar Greek term AOTOS which, from the days of Heracleitus, 
had meant to the Greek the rational unity and balance of the 
world, is taken up by St. John, by St. Clement, by St. Athanasius, 
and given a meaning which those who started from the Philonian 
position never reached. It is the personal Word, God of God, 
the Only Begotten of the Father, who is one in the Holy Spirit 
with the Father. ' The Word was God.' * By Him all things 
were made.' ' He the All-powerful, All-holy Word of the Father 
spreads His power over all things everywhere, enlightening things 
seen and unseen, holding and binding all together in Himself. 
Nothing is left empty of His presence, but to all things and 
through all, severally and collectively, He is the giver and sus- 
tainer of life. . . . He, the Wisdom of God, holds the universe 
like a lute, and keeps all things in earth and air and heaven in 
tune together. He it is Who binding all with each, and ordering 
all things by His will and pleasure, produces the perfect unity of 
nature, and the harmonious reign of law. While He abides un- 
moved forever with the Father, He yet moves all things by His 
own appointment according to the Father's will.' 1 The unity of 
nature is, thus, no longer the abstract .motionless simplicity of 
Being, which had been so powerless to explain the metaphysical 
problems of Greece. It is the living Omnipresent Word, co- 
eternal and consubstantial with the Father, and the philosophical 
truth becomes an integral part of that Christian doctrine of God, 
which, while it safeguarded religion and satisfied reason, had won 
its first and greatest victories in the field of morals. 

VII. The Christian doctrine of God triumphed over heathen 
morality and heathen speculation neither by unreasoning protest 
nor by unreal compromise, but by taking up into itself all that was 
highest and truest in both. Why then is this Christian idea of 
God challenged in our day? Have we outgrown the Christian 
idea of God, so that it cannot claim and absorb the new truths of 
our scientific age? If not, with the lessons of the past in our 
mind, we may confidently ask, — What fuller unfolding of the 

1 St. Athan., Contra Gentes, § 42. 



8o The Religion of the Incarnation. 

revelation of Himself has God in store for us, to be won, as in the 
past, through struggle and seeming antagonism ? 

The fact that the Christian Theology is now openly challenged 
by reason is obvious enough. It almost seems as if, in our intel- 
lectual life, we were passing through a transition analogous to that 
which, in the moral region, issued in the Reformation. Even 
amongst those who believe that Christian morality is true, there 
are to be found those who have convinced themselves that we 
have intellectually outgrown the Christian Faith. 'The only God,' 
we have been told lately, 1 'whom Western Europeans, with a 
Christian ancestry of a thousand years behind them, can worship, 
is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob ; or rather, of St. Paul, 
St. Augustine, and St. Bernard, and of the innumerable " blessed 
saints," canonized or not, who peopled the ages of Faith. No 
one wants, no one can care for, an abstract God, an Unknowable, 
an Absolute, with whom we stand in no human or intelligible 
relation.' ' God, as God,' says Feuerbach, 2 ' the infinite, universal, 
non-anthropomorphic being of the understanding, has no more 
significance in religion than a fundamental general principle has 
for a special science ; it is merely the ultimate point of support, 
as it were, the mathematical point of religion.' Yet it is assumed 
that this is all that remains to us, and we are left in the following 
dilemma : ' An anthropomorphic God is the only God whom 
men can worship, and also the God whom modern thought finds it 
increasingly difficult to believe in.' 3 

In such a state of things it is natural that men should turn to 
pantheism as a sort of middle term between religion and phi- 
losophy, and even claim, for the unity of the world, the venerable 
name and associations of God. But the remarkable thing is that 
in the numberless attempts to attack, or defend, or find a substi- 
tute for Theism, the Christian, or Trinitarian, teaching about God 
rarely appears upon the scene. Devout Christians have come to 
think of the doctrine of the Trinity, if not exactly as a distinct 
revelation, yet as a doctrine necessary for holding the divinity of 
Christ without sacrificing the unity of God. Ordinary people 
take it for granted that Trinitarianism is a sort of extra demand 
made on Christian faith, and that the battle must really be fought 
out on the unitarian basis. If unitarian theism can be defended, 
it will then be possible to go farther and accept the doctrine of 
the Trinity. It is natural that when Christians take this ground, 

1 Morison, Service of Man, p. 48. 

2 Quoted by W. S. Lilly, Nineteenth Century, Aug., 1888, p. 292. 
8 Morison, Service of Man, p. 49. 



II. The CJiristian Doctrine of God. 8 1 

those who have ceased to be Christian suppose that, though Chris- 
tianity is no longer tenable, they may still cling to ' Theism,' and 
even perhaps, under cover of that nebulous term, make an alliance 
not only with Jews and Mahommedans, but with at least the more 
religious representatives of pantheism. It is only our languid 
interest in speculation or a Philistine dislike of metaphysics, that 
makes such an unintelligent view possible. Unitarianism said its 
last word in the pre-Christian and early Christian period, and it 
failed, as it fails now, to save religion except at the cost of reason. 
So far from the doctrine of the Trinity being, in Mr. Gladstone's 
unfortunate phrase, ' the scaffolding of a purer theism,' non-Chris- 
tian monotheism was the ' scaffolding ' through which already the 
outlines of the future building might be seen. For the modern 
world, the Christian doctrine of God remains as the only safeguard 
in reason for a permanent theistic belief. 1 

It is not difficult to see how it is that this truth is not more 
generally recognized. The doctrine of the Trinity, by which the 
Christian idea of God absorbed Greek speculation into itself, had 
but little point cTappui in the unmetaphysical western world. It 
bore the hnpri7natur of the Church ; it was easily deducible from 
the words of Holy Scripture ; it was seen to be essential to the 
holding of the divinity of Christ. But men forgot that the doc- 
trine was ' addressed to the reason ; ' 2 and so its metaphysical 
meaning and value were gradually lost sight of. In the days of 
the mediaeval Papacy, ecclesiastical were more effective than 
metaphysical weapons, and Scholasticism knew so much about the 
deepest mysteries of God that it almost provoked an agnostic 
reaction, in the interests of reverence and' intellectual modesty. 
With the Reformation came the appeal to the letter of Holy 
Scripture, and the age of biblical, as contrasted with scientific, 
theology. The only scientific theology of the Reformation period 

1 It is far from our purpose to undervalue the work of Dr. Martineau. 
No more earnest and vigorous, and so far as it goes, no truer defence of 
religion has been published in our day. But his strength lies mainly in his 
protest against what destroys religion, and in his uncompromising assertion 
of what religion, as a condition of its existence, demands. He has done 
little to show us how these demands can be rationally satisfied, how the 
personal God, which religion demands, is even an intelligible idea. He 
wavers between a view which logically developed must result in pantheism, 
and a view implying a distinction in the Divine nature, which carries him 
far in the Trinitarian direction. More often he contents himself with leav- 
ing the speculative question alone, or storming the rational position by the 
forces of religion and morals. See A Study of Religion, vol. ii. p. 145, com- 
pared with p. 192. 

2 Newman's Arians, p. 84. 

6 



82 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

was the awful and immoral system of John Calvin, rigorously 
deduced from a one-sided truth. 

Then came the age of physical science. The break-up of the 
mediaeval system of thought and life resulted in an atomism, which, 
if it had been more perfectly consistent with itself, would have 
been fatal alike to knowledge and society. Translated into science 
it appeared as mechanism in the Baconian and Cartesian physics ; 
translated into politics it appeared as rampant individualism, 
though combined by Hobbes with Stuart absolutism. Its theory 
of, knowledge was a crude empiricism; its theology unrelieved 
deism. God was ' throned in magnificent inactivity in a remote 
corner of the universe,' and a machinery of ' second causes ' had 
practically taken His place. It was even doubted, in the deistic 
age, whether God's delegation of His power was not so absolute 
as to make it impossible for Him to ' interfere ' with the laws of 
nature. The question of miracles became the burning question 
of the day, and the very existence of God was staked on His 
power to interrupt or override the laws of the universe. Mean- 
while His immanence in nature, the 'higher pantheism,' which is 
a truth essential to true religion, as it is to true philosophy, fell 
into the background. 

Slowly but surely that theory of the world has been undermined. 
The one absolutely impossible conception of God, in the present 
day, is that which represents Him as an occasional Visitor. Science 
had pushed the deist's God farther and farther away, and at the 
moment when it seemed as if He would be thrust out altogether, 
Darwinism appeared, and, under the disguise of a foe, did the 
work of a friend. It has conferred upon philosophy and religion 
an inestimable benefit, by showing us that we must choose between 
two alternatives. Either God is everywhere present in nature, or 
He is nowhere. He cannot be here, and not there. He cannot 
delegate His power to demigods called ' second causes.' 1 In 
nature everything must be His work or nothing. We must frankly 
return to the Christian view of direct Divine agency, the imma- 
nence of Divine power in nature from end to end, the belief in 
a God in Whom not only we, but all things have their being, or 
we must banish Him altogether. It seems as if, in the providence 
of God, the mission of modern science was to bring home to our 
unmetaphysical ways of thinking the great truth of the Divine 
immanence in creation, which is not less essential to the Christian 
idea of God than to a philosophical view of nature. And it comes 

1 Cf. Fiske, Idea of God, pp. 103, 104; Martineau, A Stud)'' of Religion, 
ii. 172, 173. 



ii. The Christian Doctrine of God. &$ 

to us almost like a new truth, which we cannot at once fit in with 
the old. 

Yet the conviction that the Divine immanence must be for our 
age, as for the Athanasian age, the meeting-point of the religious 
and philosophic view of God is showing itself in the most thought- 
ful minds on both sides. Our modes of thought are becoming 
increasingly Greek, and the flood, which in our day is surging up 
against the traditional Christian view of God, is prevailingly pan- 
theistic in tone. The pantheism is not less pronounced because 
it comes as the last word of a science of nature, for the wall which 
once separated physics from metaphysics has given away, and 
positivism, when it is not the paralysis of reason, is but a tem- 
porary resting-place, preparatory to a new departure. We are not 
surprised then that one who, like Professor Fiske, holds that ' the 
infinite and eternal Power that is manifested in every pulsation of 
the universe is none other than the living God,' and who vindi- 
cates the belief in a final cause because he cannot believe that ' the 
Sustainer of the universe will put us to permanent intellectual con- 
fusion,' should instinctively feel his kinship with Athanasianism, 
and vigorously contend against the view that any part of the 
universe is ' Godless.' 1 

Unfortunately, however, the rediscovery of the truth of God's 
immanence in nature, coming, as it has done, from the side of a 
scientific theory which was violently assailed by the official guar- 
dians of the Faith, has resulted for many in the throwing aside of 
the counter and conditioning truth, which saves religion from pan- 
theism. It seemed as if traditional Christianit," were bound up with 
the view that God is wholly separate from the world and not im- 
manent in it. And Professor Fiske has been misled 2 into the 
belief that St. Augustine is responsible for that false view. It is 
almost incredible to any one who has read any of St. Augustine's 
writings, that, according to this view, he has to play the role of the 
unintelligent and unphilosophical deist, who thinks of God as 
1 a crudely anthropomorphic Being, far removed from the universe, 
and accessible only through the mediating offices of an organized 
church.' 3 And not only is St. Augustine represented as a deist, 
but St. Athanasius is made a pantheist, and the supposed conflict 
between science and religion is, we are told, really the conflict 
between Athanasian and Augustinian ideas of God. 4 Yet, as a 
matter of fact, St. Athanasius and St. Augustine both alike held the 



1 Idea of God, cf. § v. and pp. 105-110. 

2 Apparently by Professor's Allen's Continuity of Christian Thought. 

3 Fiske, Idea of God, p. 94. 4 Ibid., § vii. 



84 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

truths which deism and pantheism exaggerate into the destruction 
of religion. If St. Athanasius says, ' The Word of God is not 
contained by anything, but Himself contains all things. . . . He 
was in everything and was outside all beings, and was at rest in 
the Father alone ' x : St. Augustine says, ' The same God is wholly 
everywhere, contained by no space, bound by no bonds, divisible 
into no parts, mutable in no part of His being, filling heaven and 
earth by the presence of His power. Though nothing can exist 
without Him, yet nothing is what He is.' 2 

The Christian doctrine of God, in Athanasian days, triumphed 
where Greek philosophy failed. It accepted the challenge of 
Greek thought, it recognized the demands of the speculative 
reason, and found in itself the answer which, before the collision 
with Hellenism, it unconsciously possessed. It is challenged 
again by the metaphysics of our day. We may be wrong to 
speculate at all on the nature of God, but it is not less true now 
than in the first centuries of Christianity, that, for those who do 
speculate, a Unitarian, or Arian, or Sabellian theory is as impossible 
as polytheism. If God is to be Personal, as religion requires, 
metaphysics demands still a distinction in the Unity which unitari- 
anism is compelled to deny. But, further, the Christian doctrine 
of God is challenged by the science of nature. Science, imperi- 
ously and with increasing confidence, demands a unity in nature 
which shall be not external but immanent, giving rationality and 
coherence to all that is, and justifying the belief in the universal 
reign of law. But this immanence of God in nature unitarian 
theism cannot give, save at the price of losing itself in pantheism. 
Deistic it might be, as it was in the last century ; deistic it can 
be no longer, unless it defiantly rejects the truth which science is 
giving us, and the claims which the scientific reason makes. 

It remains then for Christianity to claim the new truth and meet 
the new demands by a fearless reassertion of its doctrine of God. 
It has to bring forth out of its treasury things new and old, — the 
old, almost forgotten truth of the immanence of the Word, the 
belief in God as ' creation's secret force,' illuminated and con- 
firmed as that is by the advance of science, till it comes to us with 
all the power of a new discovery. Slowly and under the shock of 
controversy Christianity is recovering its buried truths, and realizing 
the greatness of its rational heritage. It teaches still that God is 
the eternally existent One, the Being on Whom we depend, and in 

1 De Incarn., c. 17. 

2 De Civ. Dei, vii. c. xxx. ; cf. too De Gen. ad lit, iv. c. 12 ; Enchir. 
ad Laur., c. 27. 



ii. The Christian Doctrine of God, 85 

Whom we live, the source of all reality, and the goal to which 
creation moves, the Object alike of religion and philosophy, the 
eternal Energy of the natural world, and the immanent Reason of 
the universe. It teaches that He is the eternally Righteous One, 
and therefore the Judge of all, irrevocably on the side of right, 
leading the world by a progressive preparation for the revelation of 
Himself as Infinite Love in the Incarnation of the Word, stimu- 
lating those desires which He alone can satisfy, the yearning of the 
heart for love, of the moral nature for righteousness, of the specu- 
lative reason for truth. When men had wearied themselves in the 
search for a remedy for that which separates men from God, the 
revelation is given of Him Who ' shall save His people from their 
sins.' And when reason had wandered long, seeking for that 
which should be Real and yet One, a God Who should satisfy alike 
the demands of religion and reason, the doctrine of the Trinity is 
unfolded. It was the gradual revelation of God answering to the 
growing needs and capacity of man. 

VIII. It follows from the point of view adopted in the foregoing 
essay that there can be no proofs, in the strict sense of the word, of 
the existence of God. Reason has for its subject-matter the pro- 
blem of essence, not of existence, the question, ' What is God?' 
not ' Is there a God ? ' Proof can only mean verification a posteriori 
of a truth already held. We approach the problem with an un- 
reasoned consciousness of dependence on a Being or Beings who 
are to us invisible. This we interpret crudely, or leave uninter- 
preted. The belief may express itself in ancestor worship, or 
nature worship, or what not. But as oar moral and intellectual 
nature develops, its light is turned back upon this primitive unde- 
fined belief. Conscience demands that God shall be moral ; and 
with the belief that He is, there come confidence and trust, deep- 
ening into faith and hope and love : the speculative reason demands 
that God shall be One, the immanent unity of all that is. And the 
doctrine of God which is best able to satisfy each and all of these 
demands persists as the permanent truth of religion. But neither 
conscience nor the speculative reason can demonstrate 1 God's 
existence. And it is always possible for men to carry their distrust 
of that which is instinctive so far as to assume that it is always 
false because they have found that it is not always true. Reason 
cannot prove existence. The so-called proof a contingentia 
(which underlies H. Spencer's argument for the existence of the 

1 St. Thos. Aq., Sum. Theol., I. i. Quaest. 2, says that the Existence of God 
is demonstrable ; but he explains that he does not mean strict demonstration, 
demonstratio apodeictica, but demonstratio ab effectibus. 



86 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

Unknowable), is an appeal to that very consciousness of depend- 
ence which some people consider a weakness and a thing to edu- 
cate themselves out of. The appeal to the consensus gentium can 
establish only the generality, not the strict universality, of religion. 
It will always be possible to find exceptions, real or apparent, to 
the general rule ; while as for what is known as the ontological 
argument, which on principles of reason would justify the instinc- 
tive belief, it requires a metaphysical training to understand it, or 
at least to feel its force. There remain, however, the two great 
arguments from conscience and from nature, which are so fre- 
quently discussed in the present day. 

With regard to the first, there is no doubt that the belief in God 
will in any age find its strongest corroboration in the conscience. 
Even in the mind of a Felix the ideas of * righteousness, temper- 
ance, and judgment to come ' had a strange and terrifying cohe- 
rence. There is that much of truth in the statement that religion 
is founded in ' fear.' But the argument from conscience has been 
weakened by being overstated. Conscience, as we know it, has 
won, not indeed its existence, but the delicacy of its moral touch, 
and the strength of its ' categorical imperative,' from the assured 
belief in a real relationship between man and a holy and loving 
God. When that belief has ceased to exist, conscience still sur- 
vives, and it is possible and justifiable to appeal to it as a fact 
which can be explained by religion, but without religion must be 
explained away. But it is a mistake to suppose that we can take 
the untrained and undeveloped conscience, and argue direct from 
it to a righteous God. The lumen naturale, in its lowest develop- 
ment, gives but a faint and flickering gleam. We cannot argue 
back from it to a God of love, or even a God of righteousness, 
unless we interpret it in the fuller light of the conscience which 
has been trained and perfected under the growing influence of the 
belief. The idea of ' duty,' which is so hard to explain on utilita- 
rian grounds, is not to be found, as we know it, in Greek ethics. 
For it implies a fusion of morals with religion as we can trace, it in 
the history of Israel, and the teaching of Christian ethics. If it 
is impossible to explain duty as the result of association between 
the ideas of public and private advantage, it is no less impossible 
to make it an independent premise for a conclusion which is pre- 
supposed in it. 

The argument from nature is closely parallel. It is hard for those 
whose lives have been moulded on the belief in God, the Maker of 
heaven and earth, to understand the inconclusiveness of the argu- 
ment to those who have abandoned that belief, and start, as it were, 



II. The Christian Doctrine of God. Sj 

from outside. Consequently it has been made to bear more than 
it can carry. No doubt the evolution which was at first supposed 
to have destroyed teleology is found to be more saturated with tele- 
ology than the view which it superseded. And Christianity can 
take up the new as it did the old, and find in it a confirmation of 
its own belief. But it is a confirmation, not a proof, and taken by 
itself is incomplete. It is a great gain to have eliminated chance, 
to find science declaring that there must be a reason for everything, 
even when it cannot hazard a conjecture as to what the reason is. 
But apart from the belief of our moral nature, that in the long run 
everything must make for righteousness, that the world must be 
moral as well as rational, and that the dramatic tendency in the 
evolution of the whole would be irrational if it had not a moral 
goal, the science of nature is powerless to carry us on to a personal 
God. But the strength of a rope is greater than the strength of its 
separate strands. The arguments for the existence of God are, it 
has been said, ' sufficient, not resistless, convincing, not compell- 
ing.' x We can never demonstrate the existence of God either from 
conscience or from nature. But our belief in Him is attested and 
confirmed by both. 

In this matter, the belief in God stands on the same level with 
the belief in objective reality. Both have been explained away by 
philosophers. Neither can be proved but by a circular argument. 
Both persist in the consciousness of mankind. Both have been 
purified and rationalized by the growth of knowledge. But the 
moment reason attempts to start without assumptions, and claims 
exclusive sovereignty over man, a paralysis of thought results. 
There have been, before now, philosophers who professed to begin at 
the beginning, and accept nothing till it was proved ; and the result 
was a pure Pyrrhonism. They could not prove the existence of an 
external world. They believed it, even if they did not, like Hume, 
exult in the fact that belief triumphed over demonstration, but 
there was no sure ground for believing that the world was not a 
mere cerebral phenomenon, except the curiously rational cohe- 
rence of its visions. Even Professor Huxley, in his ultra-sceptical 
moods, admits this. He says 2 that ' for any demonstration that 
can be given to the contrary effect, the " collection of perceptions," 
which makes up our consciousness, may be an orderly phantasma- 
goria generated by the Ego, unfolding its successive scenes on the 
background of the abyss of nothingness.' But no one, least of all 

1 The Existence of God, by Rev. R. F. Clarke, S. J., p. 6. 

2 Huxley's Hume, p. 8i. 



83 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

a man of science, believes this to be so. He takes reality for 
granted, and only tries to interpret it aright, i. e., in such a way as 
to make a rational unity of the facts perceived. Tell a scientific 
specialist, — ' I am not going to let you beg the question. You 
must first prove that nature exists, and then I will hear about 
the science of nature,' and he will say, 'That is metaphysics/ 
which to him is probably a synonym for an intellectual waste of 
time. ' Look at nature,' he will say; 'what more do you want? 
If nature had been merely a phantasmagoria there would have been 
no science of nature. Of course you must make your " act of 
faith." x You must believe not only that nature exists, but that it 
is a cosmos which can be interpreted, if you can only find the key. 
The proof that nature is interpretable, is that we have, at least in 
part, been able to interpret her. There were people in John 
Locke's day who professed to doubt their own existence, and he 
was content to answer them according to their folly. " If any one," 
he says, 2 " pretends to be so sceptical as to deny his own existence 
(for really to doubt of it is manifestly impossible), let him, for me, 
enjoy his beloved happiness of being nothing, until hunger, or some 
other pain, convince him to the contrary." ' We do not call a 
scientific man unreasonable if he answers thus, though he is justi- 
fying his premises by his conclusion. We know that he that would 
study nature must believe that it is, and that it is a rational whole 
which reason can interpret. And ' he that cometh to God must 
believe that He is, and that He is the rewarder of such as dili- 
gently seek Him.' We feel our kinship with both before the instinc- 
tive consciousness is justified by reason. 

And there is a remarkable parallelism in the process of verifica- 
tion. The counterpart of the theological belief in the unity and 
omnipresence of God is the scientific belief in the unity of nature 
and the reign of law. But that belief, though implicit in the sim- 
plest operation of reason, 3 is not consciously attained till late in 
the history of science. And even when it is reached, it is not at 
once grasped in all its wealth and fulness. It is thought of as 
mere uniformity, a dull, mechanical repetition of events, which is 
powerless to explain or include the rich variety of nature and the 
phenomena of life and growth. It is to meet this difficulty that 

1 ' The one act of faith in the convert to science, is the confession of the 
universality of order and of the absolute validity, in all times and under all 
circumstances, of the law of causation. This confession is an act of faith, 
because, by the nature of the case, the truth of such propositions is not sus- 
ceptible of proof.' — Huxley, in Darwin's Life and Letters, ii. 200. 

2 Essay IV. 10, § 2. 

3 Cf. Green's Works, ii. 284. 



II. The Christian Doctrine of God. 89 

J. S. Mill naively assures us that ' the course of nature is not only 
uniform, it is also infinitely various.' * But soon the truth is 
grasped, that the reign of law is a unity which is higher than mere 
uniformity, because it is living, and not dead, and includes and 
transcends difference. It is the analogue in science to that 
higher and fuller view of God in which He is revealed as Trinity 
in Unity. 

But as these parallel processes of verification go on, the truth is 
forced upon the world that religion and philosophy must either be 
in internecine conflict, or recognize the oneness of their Object. 
'We and the philosophers,' says St. Clement, ' know the same God, 
but not in the same way.' 2 Philosophy and religion have both 
been enriched by wider knowledge, and as their knowledge has 
become deeper and fuller, the adjustment of their claims has 
become more imperatively necessary. Few in our day would will- 
ingly abandon either, or deliberately sacrifice one to the other. 
Many would be ready to assent to the words of a Christian Father : 
' When philosophy and the worship of the gods are so widely sepa- 
rated that the professors of wisdom cannot bring us near to the 
gods, and the priests of religion cannot give us wisdom, it is man- 
ifest that the one is not true wisdom, and the other is not true 
religion. Therefore neither is philosophy able to conceive the 
truth, nor is religion able to justify itself. But where philosophy 
is joined by an inseparable connection with religion, both must 
necessarily be true, because in our religion we ought to be wise, 
that is, to know the true Object and mode of worship, and in our 
wisdom to worship, that is, to realize in action what we know.' 3 

It is sometimes argued : You have let in more than the thin 
end of the wedge. You admit that ' it is the province of reason to 
judge of the morality of the Scripture.' 4 You profess no antago- 
nism to historical and literary criticism. Under the criticism of 
reason, Fetichism has given way to Polytheism, Polytheism to 
Monotheism, even Monotheism has become progressively less 
anthropomorphic. Why object to the last step in the process, and 
cling to the belief in a Personal God ? Simply because it would 
make the difference between a religion purified and a religion 
destroyed. The difference between the 30,000 gods of Hesiod, 
and the One God of Christianity, is a measurable difference ; the 
difference between a Personal God and an impersonal reason is, 
so far as religion is concerned, infinite. For the transition from 

1 Log., Bk. III. ch. in. § 2. 2 Strom., vi. 5. 

3 Lact, Institt., IV. iii. 4 Butler's Analogy, Pt. II. ch. iii. p. 183. 



go The Religio?i of the Incarnation. 

Monotheism to Pantheism is made only by the surrender of reli- 
gion, though the term ' theism ' may be used to blur the line of 
separation, and make the transition easy. 

Religion has, before all things, to guard the heritage of truth, 
the moral revelation of God in Christ, to ' contend earnestly for 
the faith once delivered to the saints,' and to trust to the promised 
guidance of the Spirit of Truth. And reason interprets religion to 
itself, and by interpreting verifies and confirms. Religion there- 
fore claims as its own the new light which metaphysics and science 
are in our day throwing upon the truth of the immanence of God • 
it protests only against those imperfect, because premature, syn- 
theses, which in the interests of abstract speculation would destroy 
religion. It dares to maintain that ' the Fountain of wisdom and 
religion alike is God ; and if these two streams shall turn aside 
from Him, both must assuredly run dry.' For human nature 
craves to be both religious and rational. And the life which is not 
both is neither. 



III. 

THE PROBLEM OF PAIN. 



J. R. ILLINGWORTH. 



III. 

THE PROBLEM OF PAIN. 

The problem of pain, always prominent in a sensitive age, has 
been exceptionally emphasized in the literature of modern pessi- 
mism as an objection to Theism in general, and Christianity in par- 
ticular. The existence of pain is urged as incompatible with the 
belief in a God Who is at once omnipotent and benevolent, that is, 
with Theism in its ordinary form ; while Christianity is further 
charged with being a religion of pain, a religion which has increased 
the sum of actual, and the expectation of prospective, pain, darken- 
ing the shadow that lies upon our race. Suffering is not a subject 
upon which anything new can be said. It has long ago been 
probed to the utmost limit of our capacity, and remains a mystery 
still. But, in face of the adverse use now made of it, it may be 
well to bear in mind how much has been said and is to be said 
upon the other side. 

To begin with, there are two classes of pain, animal and human, 
which, however intimately they may be connected, must, for clear- 
ness, be considered apart. The universality of pain throughout 
the range of the animal world, reaching back into the distant ages 
of geology, and involved in the very structure of the animal organ- 
ism, is without doubt among the most serious problems which the 
Theist has to face. But it is a problem in dealing with which emo- 
tion is very often mistaken for logic. J. S. Mill's famous indictment 
of nature, for example, is one of the most emotional pieces of rhe- 
toric of which a professed logician was ever guilty. When a cer- 
tain class of facts is urged in objection to our Christian belief, we 
are entitled to ask how many of those facts are known, and how 
many are only imagined. There is of course a scientific use of the 
imagination, but it is only permissible within the bounds of possible, 
or at least conceivable, verification. Imaginative conjectures 
which, from the nature of the case, will never admit either of veri- 
fication or disproof are poetry and not science, and must be treated 
as such in argument. With all the changes that have passed over 



94 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

our knowledge, we may still do well to attend to the caution with 
which Butler begins his Analogy : — 

' One cannot but be greatly sensible how difficult it is to silence 
imagination enough to make the voice of reason even distinctly 
heard ; as we are accustomed from our youth up to indulge that 
forward delusive faculty, ever obtruding beyond its sphere ; of some 
assistance indeed to apprehension, but the author of all error : as 
we plainly lose ourselves in gross and crude conceptions of things, 
taking for granted that we are acquainted with what indeed we are 
wholly ignorant of.' 

This needs repeating, because much of the popular knowledge 
of the day consists in the acceptance of results without examination 
of the methods of their attainment ; somewhat as, in the country- 
man's simple faith, a thing must needs be true because he has seen 
it in a book. While the case in point is further confused by the 
fact that imagination has an important bearing on all our conduct 
towards the lower animals, and cannot, for that purpose, be too 
emotionally developed. But it is one thing to err on the safe 
side in practice, and another to convert such possible error into 
argument. 

What then do we really know about the suffering of animals ? 
No reasonable man doubts that they suffer. But the degree and 
intensity of their suffering is almost entirely a matter of conjecture. 
We speak of, and are affected by the mass of animal suffering ; but 
we must remember that it is felt distributively. No one animal 
suffers more because a million suffer likewise. And what we have 
to consider is the amount which an individual animal suffers. We 
have no knowledge, but we are entitled to meet conjecture by con- 
jecture. We may fairly suppose that the animals do not ' look 
before and after,' and it is this that gives its sting to human pain. 
Again, they would seem, like children, to give strong indications of 
slight pain. Further, many muscular contortions which simulate 
extreme suffering are believed on scientific evidence to be due to 
quite other causes. And then there are the phenomena of fascina- 
tion, which may well resemble the experience of Livingstone in the 
lion's mouth. While many pains are prophylactic and directly 
contribute to the avoidance of danger and maintenance of life. 
All these considerations may mitigate our view of animal suffering. 
But a stronger argument is to be drawn from our profound ignor- 
ance of the whole question. Animals can perceive colors invisible 
to us ; they seem to have organs of sensation of whose nature we 
know nothing ; their instincts are far more numerous and finer than 
our own ; what compensations may they not have ? Again, what 



in. The Problem of Pain. 95 

are they? Had they a past? May they not have a future? What 
is the relation of their consciousness to the mighty life which 
pulses within the universe? May not Eastern speculation about 
these things be nearer the truth than Western science ? All these 
questions are in the region of the unknown, and the unknowable ; 
and in face of them the Theistic position is simply this. We 
believe, on complex and cumulative proof, in an omnipotent and 
benevolent Creator. That belief is a positive verdict of our reason, 
interpreting evidence which we consider irresistible. And against 
such a conclusion no presumption of the imagination, which from 
the nature of the case cannot possibly be verified, has any logical 
validity at all ; not to mention that such presumptions admit of 
being met by as probable presumptions on the other side. We 
decline to arraign our Creator for a deed which we have not even 
the means of knowing that He has done. 

' All difficulties as to how they [the animals] are to be disposed 
of are so apparently and wholly founded in our ignorance that it is 
wonderful they should be insisted upon by any but such as are 
weak enough to think they are acquainted with the whole system 
of things. . . . What men require is to have all difficulties cleared ; 
and this is, or at least for anything we know to the contrary it may 
be, the same as requiring to comprehend the Divine nature, and 
the whole plan of providence from everlasting to everlasting.' 1 

But with human suffering the case is different, for here we are 
in a measure behind the scenes. We watch the process no longer 
from the outside, but from within ; and though it still remains mys- 
terious, its mystery is full of meaning. In saying this we make two 
assumptions : first, that moral evil is an ultimate fact for us, in our 
present state of being, in the sense that it can neither be explained 
nor explained away ; and secondly, that character, and not pleas- 
ure, being, and not feeling, or, to phrase it more generally, the 
greatest goodness of the greatest number, is the primary end of 
ethics. The first of these assumptions most men are willing to 
admit, while the few philosophical attempts to disprove it have con- 
spicuously failed. The second has the assent of all moralists 
except the hedonists, and those who without being aware of it are 
hedonists in disguise : the pessimism, for example, which makes 
so much of pain, being simply disappointed hedonism. Starting 
then from these premises, the problem of practical ethics is the 
formation of character in the face of moral evil. And in the solu- 
tion of this problem pain and sorrow have a place which no other 
known agency conceivably could fill. 

1 Butler, Analogy. 



g6 The Religion of the Incarnation, 

To begin with its simplest if lowest aspect, pain is a punishment ; 
and without importing any a priori notions into the question, we 
find punishment to be a necessary element in the evolution of 
character. Punishment is a complex thing, and the tendency of 
civilization is to lay stress upon its corrective rather than its vindic- 
tive aspect. But we must remember that with uncivilized races 
this cannot be the case ; and that pains and penalties, considered 
simply as retrospective vengeance for the past, have been histori- 
cally, and in some cases still are, essential to our social develop- 
ment. Indeed, it is a shallow view that regards vengeance as a 
survival of savagery. Vengeance is intimately bound up with our 
sense of justice, and the true difference between the savage and 
the sage is that what the one eagerly inflicts upon his neighbor, 
the other would far more willingly inflict upon himself. Plato 
expressed this once for all when he said that the sinner who is 
punished is happier than the sinner who escapes scot free. We 
rightly shrink, as far as possible, from sitting in judgment on our 
fellow-men ; but we feel none the less that our own ill deeds 
demand a penalty, which may vary from bodily suffering to interior 
shame, but which in one form or another must be endured before 
we can recover our self-respect. And self-respect is a necessary 
factor in all moral progress. Punishment, then, considered as ven- 
geance, is a necessity for the social development of barbarous 
races ; and though less obviously, quite as really for the personal 
progress of the civilized man. 

Now, without committing ourselves to the statement that suffer- 
ing was introduced into the world by sin, which is not a Christian 
dogma, though it is often thought to be so, a vast amount of the 
suffering in the world is obviously punishment, and punishment of 
a very searching kind. For not only are obvious vices punished 
with remorse, and disease, and shame, but ignorance, impatience, 
carelessness, even mistakes of judgment, are punished too, and 
that in a degree which we are apt to consider disproportionate ; 
forgetful that consequences are God's commentaries, and^ this 
apparent disproportion may reflect light upon the real magnitude 
of what we often are too ready to consider trivial things. 

But these punishments, it is urged, fall on the innocent as well 
as the guilty. And this leads us to another point of view. Pam 
is not only punitive. It is also corrective and purgatorial. And 
this again is a fact of ordinary experience, quite apart from the 
further consideration of why it should be so. Among primitive 
races the penalties of law, by the merely mechanical process of 
forcibly restraining certain actions, slowly elevate the social tone. 



in. The Problem of Pain. 97 

And as men rise in the scale of development and begin to be a 
law to themselves, the same process is continued within the indi- 
vidual mind. The pains and penalties of evil doing, physical and 
mental, tend to correct and purify the character; and when we 
say that men learn wisdom by experience, we mostly mean by 
experience of something painful. Of course, the most obvious 
form of this correction is that in which the suffering can be recog- 
nized by the sufferer as merited, because due to his own misdeeds. 
But apart from such causal connection, what we call unmerited 
suffering exercises the same influence in an even greater measure. 
Its forces, not being exhausted in the work of neutralizing past 
evil, are able to expand and expend themselves in a positive 
direction, elevating, refining, dignifying the character to an infi- 
nite degree. The men of sorrows are the men of influence in 
every walk of life. Martyrdon. is the certain road to success in 
any cause. Even more than knowledge, pain is power. And all 
this because it develops the latent capacities of our being as no 
other influence can. It requires no mystic insight to see the 
truth of this. However unable we may be to account for it, it is 
a fact of every-day experience, visible to ordinary common-sense. 
And this being so, there is nothing of necessity unjust in what we 
call unmerited suffering, not even in the sad inheritance by chil- 
dren of the results of parental sin. For while the sight of the mis- 
erable entail may, if rightly used, become the parent's punishment, 
its imposition may be the child's call to higher things. True, like 
all other useful agencies, it often fails of its end ; but such failure 
is of the problem of evil, not of the problem of pain. 

And, lastly, with men, as with animals, suffering is largely pro- 
phylactic. Bodily pain sounds the alarm-bell of disease in time 
for its removal. Mental and moral pain arrest the issues of igno- 
rant or evil courses before it is too late. While the desire to 
remove pain from ourselves, or better still from others, is among 
the strongest incentives of the scientific discoverer, the patriot, 
the philanthropist. And though it may seem a fallacy to credit 
pain with the virtues which spring from the desire for its removal, 
common-sense rises above logic and recognizes the real value of 
a spur without which many of our noblest activities would cease. 

Now, though all these considerations naturally lead on into the- 
ology for their further treatment, yet it should be noticed that they 
are in no sense exclusively theological. The penal, the corrective, 
the preventive, and the stimulating uses of pain are all recognized 
in the average man's philosophy of life. Indeed, they are too 
obvious to need dwelling on at any length. But the point to be 

7 



98 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

noticed is, that taken together, they cover a very great deal of 
ground. For it is hardly too much to say that in one or other of 
its various aspects, every human being has need of suffering for the 
due development of his character. And this is a fact which should 
go far to outweigh much brilliant declamation of the pessimists. 
Pessimism, in fact, stereotypes and gives a fictitious permanence to 
what is only one among our many moods of thought. It harps 
upon the fact that ve naturally shrink from pain. It ignores the 
fact that we are conscious of being the better for it, and unable to 
conceive progress without it. And though these considerations 
afford no solution to the speculative mystery of pain, they make in 
the direction of a speculative solution. They do not explain why 
pain exists, but they show us that its existence, in the only region 
in which we can really test it, is eminently useful, and therefore 
consistent with providential and beneficent design. Their precise 
logical relation to the Theistic argument might be put as follows : 
Arguments drawn from many departments of life and thought con- 
verge in favor of Theism, but one large and important department, 
that of human suffering, blocks the way. When, however, we iso- 
late and examine that department, we find that even within its 
limits the evidence of provident purpose is prominent, if not pre- 
ponderant. Its prominence is certainly enough to neutralize the 
negative bearing of the department upon the general argument. 
Its preponderance, which many if not most men would admit, 
carries us farther, and makes the net evidence of the whole depart- 
ment an affirmative contribution to Theism. 

So far common-sense carries us. But when we turn to the place 
of pain in the religions of the world, two further thoughts are 
suggested. In the first place, the belief in a future life, which is 
common to almost all religions, at once opens endless vistas of 
possibility before us. The pain which has failed to purify here, 
may yet purify hereafter ; the high-handed wrong-doing, which 
has seemed to go unpunished here, may there meet with its right- 
eous due. The pains which we have thought excessive here, may 
there be found to have worked out for us a far more exceeding 
weight of glory. And so the particular difficulty which arises from 
the unequal incidence of earthly suffering may one day find its 
adequate solution. No doubt there is an element of truth in the 
familiar taunt that belief in a future life has been a curse as well as 
a blessing to the world. In some stages of culture, for example, 
the future life has been supposed only to emphasize the inequal- 
ities of the present : the slave living on in everlasting slavery, and 
the warrior in incessant war. But this has been a partial and a 



in. The Problem of Pain. 99 

passing phase of thought, which rapidly gave way before more 
ethical conceptions. The ethical conceptions in their turn, which 
were based on future rewards and punishments, confessedly could 
not produce a very high type of morality. But they have filled 
their place, and that a large one in the history of human develop- 
ment, while even after ceasing to be the dominant motives, they 
still witness to the ineradicable expectation of our race, that holi- 
ness and happiness, sin and failure, shall one day coincide. More 
serious and sad is the fact that distorted dreams of future punish- 
ment have often reflected a lurid light upon the whole of life ; 
goading zealots into cruelty, sinners into madness, thinkers into 
unbelief; and have lingered on, as savage survivals, even into 
Christian times, to the hopeless obscuration, in many minds, of 
the creed that God is Love. But even here we must draw dis- 
tinctions. Early races express intensity by an accumulation of 
material metaphors, — fecundity by a hundred breasts, omnipo- 
tence and omniscience by a hundred arms or a thousand eyes. 
And so, when they saw the unrighteous man enjoy the fruits of 
his unrighteousness, and die in unrebuked defiance of laws human 
and divine, their sense of outraged justice could not but express 
itself in terms of material horror. We have grown to be more 
pitiful, more refined in our moral thinking, less dogmatic about 
unknown things ; yet neither our moral experience nor our Chris- 
tianity has availed to remove the dread of that unutterable ' pain 
of loss' which the passing of a soul in obdurate impenitence has 
ever suggested to the mind of man. And however confidently 
therefore we may put aside the distortions, and debasements, and 
interested exaggerations which have darkened the thought of 
future punishment, we must remember that the thought itself was 
no alien introduction into history, but due to the instinctive crav- 
ing of the human heart for justice, — man's own tremendous verdict 
on his sin. 1 But the universality, or at least extreme generality, of 
the belief in a continued existence, is quite distinct from the par- 
ticular pictures of it which the imagination has variously drawn ; 
much as the universality of conscience is distinct from its varying 
content among diverse races and in different ages. And the 
broad fact remains that from the dawn of history the majority of 
mankind have believed in and looked with confidence to a future 
life to rectify, and therefore justify, the inequalities of earthly suf- 
fering ; however much their views have varied as to what should 
constitute rectification. 

1 Cf. pp. 43 x -433* 



ioo The Religion of the Incarnation, 

Secondly, there is an instinctive tendency in all religions, from 
the savage upwards, to view pain, whether in the form of asceticism 
or sacrifice, as inseparably connected with an acceptable service of 
the gods or God. The asceticism of poor Caliban foregoing his 
little mess of whelks, and that of the Hindoo whose meritorious 
sufferings are expected to prevail, by intrinsic right, with Heaven ; 
the hideous holocausts of Mexico, and the paper substitutes for offer- 
ings of the parsimonious or hypocritical Chinee are widely different 
things. But they all spring from a common instinct, variously dis- 
torted, yet persistent through all distortions, and progressively 
refined, till it culminates in the Hebrew substitution of the broken 
heart for the blood of bulls and of goats. It is the custom of some 
modern writers to represent the higher forms of sacrifice as merely 
survivals of the savage desire to propitiate the gods by food. But 
this is not an adequate analysis even of the savage creed. Natur- 
ally enough the primitive hunter, to whom food is the chief good, 
may think food the worthiest offering to the gods. But it is not 
simply food, but his own food, that he offers, the choicest morsel, 
that which it costs him something to forego. In other words, the 
root of sacrifice is self-sacrifice, however crudely it may be ex- 
pressed. Of course, the primitive hypocrite would seek to evade 
personal suffering as naturally as the civilized hypocrite will give 
alms at another man's expense. But sincerity must come before 
hypocrisy, and the sacrificial instinct is in origin sincere. Its first 
account of itself may be irrational, and its earlier manifestations 
often blundering and repulsive ; and if it were now only a survival, 
the same should be true of its later forms, for survivals are not 
commonly improved in the process of surviving. But so far from 
this being the case, it has been refined by successive developments, 
and is as integral an element of later as of earlier religions, being 
in fact the symbolic statement that a more or less painful self- 
surrender is the necessary condition of all human approach to the 
divine. Natural religion then, in the widest use of the term, car- 
ries us on beyond common-sense, in attributing a mysterious value 
to suffering here, and expecting an explanation of its anomalies 
hereafter. The first belief may be called mystical, the second 
hypothetical ; and yet the two together have done more to recon- 
cile man to his burden of sorrow than all the philosophic com- 
ments on the uses of adversity ; for they have seemed to lift him, 
though blindfold, into a loftier region, where he felt himself in- 
breathing power from on high. And so here, as in other things, 
natural religion leads on into Christianity. 

The relation of Christianity to the problem of pain, may be best 



in. The Problem of Pain. ioi 

seen by contrasting it with the empirical optimism of common- 
sense. Enlightened common-sense, as we have seen, is fully 
aware of the uses of sorrow ; but it looks at the usefulness through 
the sorrowfulness, as a compensation which should make the wise 
man content to bear his pain. The change which Christianity has 
effected consists in the reversal of this view of the subject. Once 
for all, it has put the value before the painfulness in our thoughts. 
The Author and Finisher of our faith, ' for the joy that was set 
before Him, endured the Cross, despising the shame,' and ' our 
light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far 
more exceeding weight of glory, while we look not at the things 
which are seen, but at the things which are unseen/ It bids us 
not wait ' till the sorrow comes with years,' but take up our cross, 
from the first moment of our conscious discipleship. And accord- 
ingly the real Christian looks at sorrow, not from without, but from 
within, and does not approach its speculative difficulty till he is 
aware by experience of its practical power. Consequently he 
cannot explain himself to the merely external critic. He may 
urge in argument such general considerations as have been touched 
upon above, and meet the pleas of pessimism with the counter- 
pleas of philosophic optimism ; but if pressed for the inner secret 
of his own serenity, he can only answer with the esoteric invita- 
tion, ' Come and see.' Enter the dim sanctuary of sorrow through 
the shadow of the Cross. Abide there, and as your eyes grow 
accustomed to the darkness, the strange lines upon its walls which 
seemed at first so meaningless, will group themselves into shapes 
and forms of purposeful design. 

Once for all the sinless suffering of the Cross has parted sin 
from suffering with a clearness of distinction never before achieved. 
The intellectual Greek had tended to confuse the two as kindred 
forms of ignorance ; the weary Oriental as kindred consequences 
of our imprisonment in the body, ' the too, too solid flesh ; ' 
the self-righteous Jew viewed blindness, or death from a falling 
tower, as evidence of exceptional sin. Everywhere in the ancient 
world the outlines of the two were undefined, and their true rela- 
tion of antagonism misunderstood. But the sight of perfect sinless- 
less, combined with perfect suffering, has cleared our view forever. 
Sin, indeed, always brings suffering in its train ; but the suffering 
we now see to be of the nature of its antidote, — an antidote often 
applied indeed with inexorable sternness, but in its intention wholly 
merciful. Thus every sin has its appropriate suffering. Bodily 
indulgence brings bodily disease ; cruelty ends in cowardice ; 
pride and vanity in shame. And though the suffering of itself 



102 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

cannot convert the sinner, it can and does prevent both the grati- 
fication and contagion of the sin. Then comes the more terrible 
sorrow of remorse ; and remorse is potential penitence, and peni- 
tence potential purification. But while sin thus involves suffering, 
suffering does not involve sin. It is not only an antidote, but one 
of those antidotes which taken in time is prophylactic. And this 
is not only true of the pains of self-denial and self-sacrifice, the 
voluntary bearing of the cross, but of many an involuntary sorrow 
also. Delicate health, Plato's bridle of Theages, inherited pain, spir- 
itual privation, bereavement, may all refine the character and train 
the eye to that purity of heart that shall see God. Pain, in fact, 
in its manifold methods, is like the angel of the Eastern story, — 
changing its form incessantly to cope with the shifting shapes of 
sin, and passing by turns into a lion, a bird, a sword, a flood, a 
flame, in sleepless eagerness to follow and find, and slay and 
quench and burn away the least last lingering particle of evil. So 
far from being our enemy, it is our safest ally in the battle of life, 
and we fail through shrinking from the stern alliance. We suffer 
because we sin ; but we also sin because we decline to suffer. 

Still, the very sharpness of the severance between sin and suffer- 
ing on the Cross forces upon us the further question : Why should 
the sinless suffer? The vicarious suffering of Christ is said to con- 
flict with our sense of justice. And it does so, as misrepresented 
in much popular theology. But rightly viewed, it is the climax 
and complete expression of the process to which we owe the entire 
evolution of our race. The pleasures of each generation evapo- 
rate in air ; it is their pains that increase the spiritual momentum 
of the world. We enter into life through the travail of another. 
We live upon the death of the animals beneath us. The neces- 
sities, the comforts, the luxuries of our existence are provided by 
the labor and sorrow of countless fellow-men. Our freedom, our 
laws, our literature, our spiritual sustenance, have been won for us 
at the cost of broken hearts, and wearied brains, and noble lives 
laid down. And this is only the human analogue of that trans- 
ference of energy by which all life and movement is forever car- 
ried on. The sun is so much the cooler by the heat it daily gives 
to earth; the plant and tree the weaker by the force that has 
matured their fruit; the animal generations exhausted in con- 
tinuing their kind. And how should their Creator draw all men 
unto Him but through the instrumentality of His own great law of 
sacrifice ? If we shrink from our share in the conditions of the 
solemn legacy, it is easy to persuade ourselves that the system of 
things is wrong. But if we accept it, and resolve that we too in 



in. The Problem of Pain. 103 

our turn will spend and be spent for others, we find beneath all 
the superficial suffering the deep truth of the benediction, ' It is 
more blessed to give than to receive.' And in the experience of 
that benediction we see further still into the mysterious significance 
of sorrow. 

Further ; but not yet to the end. For the human heart desires 
more than merely to work for others. It desires to be one with 
those for whom it works. Love is the highest form of that unity ; 
but even short of actual love, we instinctively crave communion 
and sympathy with our kind. And it is no morbid view of life to 
say that sorrow brings about this union in a way that joy does not. 
There is something, under our present conditions, in the very 
expansiveness of joy which dissociates, while sorrow seems to 
weld us, like hammer strokes on steel. It is the nationality whose 
members have together struggled for existence, the soldiers who 
have faced the shock of battle side by side, the persecuted party, 
the husband and wife who have known common suffering, that are 
most intimately, indissolubly one. Nor is this union merely nega- 
tive, like the bond which fellow-prisoners feel, and yet would 
eagerly escape from if they could. It is due to a distinct sense 
that the common crisis has aroused all that is highest and noblest 
and most spiritual, and therefore most sympathetic, in the soul. 

But again, it is only in the light from the Cross that we can see 
why pain should possess this power. For in that light we under- 
stand how pain unites us to each other, because, as even natural 
religion dimly felt, it unites us to God, and therefore through Him 
to those who in Him live and move and have their being. It 
unites us to God because it purifies us, because it detaches us 
from earth, because it quickens our sense of dependence, because 
it opens our spiritual vision, and above all because He too, as 
man, has suffered. But the mystics who have seen farthest into 
heavenly things have felt that it unites us to God in still more vital 
wise, as being, at least in its form of sacrifice, the very beating of 
the heart of love. And so they have raised the question : Has 
it not an antitype far in the illimitable depths of the unseen? For 
we are told that God is Love ; and love, as we know it, must be 
shown in sacrifice ; though the sacrifice grows painless in propor- 
tion as the love is pure. And when we recall how in the days of 
our Lord's ministry on earth, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit bore 
their witness each to other, but no one of the Holy Persons ever 
to Himself, we are led on to wonder whether 'in the light that no 
man can approach unto,' where the Three are One, some higher 
analogue of what we call sacrifice does not forever flame ; whose 



104 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

radiant reflection on the universe only becomes shadow wheti it 
falls on a world of sin. But however these high things may be, 
the simplest Christian feels and knows that, in his present state, 
the unitive way, the way to union with both God and man, is the 
'via dolorosa,' the way of the cross, — a serious and solemn belief, 
which is very far from leading to complacency, in presence of the 
awful spectacle of animal and human pain, but still is based on 
sufficient experience to justify the hope that all its mystery will 
be one day solved. More than this we do not expect, for the 
intellect, in our Christian view, is as much on its probation and 
as liable to error as the will ; and inordinate curiosity not less 
misleading than inordinate desire. 



IV. 



PREPARATION IN HISTORY FOR 
CHRIST 



EDWARD S. TALBOT. 



IV. 

PREPARATION IN HISTORY FOR CHRIST 

The paradox of Divine mystery implied in the words 'The 
Word was made flesh,' is not exhausted by a right understanding 
of the Person of Christ. It extends to the relations between 
Christ and History. On the one hand, the Incarnation of the 
Son of God appears as supreme, solitary, unique, transcending all 
analogies of experience, all limitations of nationality or generation, 
determined before the world was, beyond the power of any ante- 
cedents to produce, the entry of a new thing into the world. It 
appears, in short, as a miracle. But, on the other hand, it appears 
as an historical event, occurring at a particular date, appealing to 
the feelings and fulfilling the hopes of the time, a climax and a 
new point of departure in the historical order. It does this, 
necessarily, because this is involved in the act of taking flesh, of 
entering simply, literally, naturally into the conditions of human 
life. Such a thing occurs, and must occur, in the natural order. 
To say this is not to dictate what a Divine revelation must be, but 
only to show what Christianity asserts of itself. In this way it was 
good in God's sight that His revelation should come. 

It follows from this, in the first place, that there must be two 
ways, both valid and necessary, of approaching in thought and 
study Christ manifest in the flesh. We may treat the fact of His 
appearing with little or no reference to historical relations, for its 
own inherent unchanging truth and meaning. We may also treat 
it as clothed in historical event, to be understood in its relations 
with what went before and followed after and stood around. The 
two methods supplement one another. It may be true that the 
simple personal claim which the solitary figure of Jesus Christ 
makes upon us, by its unalterable moral dignity and beauty, its 
typical humanity, its unearthly authority, is the strongest that can 
be made : none the less may that claim be confirmed and rein- 
forced if we see the same figure as it were upon an historical 
throne ; if it should become clear that what went before (and 



io8 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

what followed after) does, in any way, pay homage to Him ; if 
the manner of His appearing in place and time be calculated to 
heighten the impression which the fact of it makes. 

And in the second place, it follows that to start in any historical 
treatment of the subject of this paper from the central twofold 
assertion as to Christ, made by St. John in the phrase, ' The Word 
was made flesh,' is to obtain at once the right clew to the lines which 
it should follow. 

( i ) To do so is not to beg the question or to fetter the inquiry, 
but only to define what kind of evidence, if any, the study of 
Christ's relation to foregoing history can yield. We see that it 
must be such as works in us the conviction that He both does, 
and does not, occur ' naturally ' at the time and place when He 
appeared ; that history leads up to Him and prepares His way, 
and yet that no force of natural antecedents can account for Him 
or for His work. It is true that evidence for either side of this 
two-sided impression may have sufficient weight to determine 
faith, especially with individual minds. The contrast between 
Christ and all else in history, arresting the attention and suggesting 
the thought of special Divine presence, may of itself be a spring 
of faith ; or, upon the other hand, a clear discernment of His 
natural supremacy in history may lead a man on to higher truth. 
But the true evidence, as corresponding to the true and full claim, 
will be that which suggests the conclusion with simultaneous and 
equal force from either side. 

(2) If the aim is not evidence but instruction, and we desire 
simply to understand better what is true of our Lord's relation to 
history, it will still advantage us greatly to start from the same 
point. We shall be able to recognize freely and without fear of 
contradiction or confusion, on the one side, the way in which the 
lines of history, of human experience, aspiration, achievement, 
character, need, lead up to Christ and issue in Him ; and on the 
other, the unearthly and peculiar greatness of Him Who spake as 
never man spake, Who taught as one that had authority and not 
as the Scribes, Who was not convinced by any of sin ; Whose 
daily intimacy with a disciple issued in that disciple's confession, 
' Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God.' Such a method, 
starting from the Christian claim, and trying to trace out all that 
it involves, need not be only for the believer, any more than 
the quest for evidence or witness is for those only who do not 
believe. The Christian tests the foundations, and welcomes every 
corroboration, of his faith ; while, in dwelling on the character of 
the work and of its relations to all else, the non-believer may come 






iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 109 

to find the conviction grow upon him that it was indeed ' wrought 
of God.' 

(3) From the same point, we see at once to what double mis- 
understanding or double attack the Gospel not only may but must 
be liable. On the one side, it may be refused a hearing as miracu- 
lous ; it may be understood as violating the natural order which it 
transcends ; it may be regarded and resented as an anomaly in 
history. On the other side, a consideration of the aptness of its 
occurrence when and where it did occur, and of its harmonious 
relations to many lines of tendency, will suggest the suspicion that 
it may be after all only a result, though a supreme and surprising 
result, of historical forces. In a word, it may be accused at once 
from separate, possibly from the same, quarters as too supernatural 
and too natural to be what it claims to be. It is all important to 
notice at the outset that liability to this double attack is an inevi- 
table incident of its true character and of that which makes its 
glory ; namely, the presence of true Godhead under truly human 
conditions. 

But to return to the main point. 

The importance and interest of the subject of this paper may 
be inferred, as we have seen, directly from what the Incarnation 
claims to be. But we are not left to infer it for ourselves. Noth- 
ing is clearer or more striking than the place which it occupied 
from the outset in the declaration of the Gospel. Jesus Himself 
spoke of the Scribes of the kingdom as ' bringing forth out of their 
treasure things new and old ; ' and laid it down as a first principle 
of His kingdom that He was ' not come to destroy, but to fulfil.' * 
While with surprising and commanding clearness He centres men 
upon Himself, and distinguishes Himself from all who came before 
Him, from 'the prophets and the law which prophesied until 
John ; ' He yet with evident care draws the new out of the old, 
and fits it on to the old ; He delineates His own mission as a 
climax in a long appeal of God to Israel, 2 and the opposition to 
Him and His, as a chapter of denouement in the history of an old 
conflict between God and the ungodly. 3 He sees a ' necessity \ 
for the happening of things to fulfil what had been said of old. 4 
The very pith of the disciples' ignorance is their failure to see 
how the features of His work and character had been traced 
beforehand, and the supreme teaching which they receive from 
Him is that which discloses His correspondence to the whole 

1 St. Matt. xiii. 52 ; v. 17. 2 St. Matt. xxi. 33-38. 

8 St. Matt., v. 12; xxiii. 30-37. 4 St. Mark xiv. 49; St. Luke xxii. yj. 



no The Religion of the Incarnation. 

tenor of the Scriptures of the past. 1 The teaching of the Apostles, 
and of those who followed them, is faithful to these lines. Though 
they have to convince the world of an Event which works a revo- 
lution, which is to turn men from darkness to light ; though their 
perfect confidence in their own truth makes them see the things 
that went before as elements, * weak and beggarly elements,' 2 and 
they have moreover battles to fight against these ' elements ' set up 
again as antagonists ; though their adherence to the Old Testament 
was an ever-fruitful source of difficulty and attack (of which 
Judaizing and Gnostic controversies are the record), — yet never- 
theless they unswervingly maintained the inspiration of the Old 
Testament, and stood upon it ; and we distinguish without hesita- 
tion as their normal, primary, characteristic method that of appeal 
to the correspondence between their Gospel and every hope and 
word of Israel's faith : the ' revelation of the mystery . . . is . . . 
by the scriptures of the prophets . . . made known to all nations.' 3 
The Hebrews, who wistfully look back to their temple, law, and 
ritual, are not taught a stern forgetfulness of what had been, nor 
led vaguely to spiritualize its meaning, but are led to recognize in 
each part of the ancient system a line which leads up to Christ. 
Finally, the disciple who sets the true being of his Master in 
monumental and awful splendor as the Word Who ' was with God 
and was God ' now made manifest in the flesh, in the same breath 
carries us to the very core and source of all that can be implied in 
preparation by declaring the same Word to have been 'in the 
world' before, to have been the author of all things, and the 
unseen light of men. 4 

The relation of Christ to history, or the preparation for the 
Gospel, is then no afterthought of our own or any recent time. 
It was Augustine's saying that Christianity was as old as the 
world : 5 and Tertullian's (one of almost venturesome boldness) 
that in the previous history Christ was schooling Himself for 
incarnation. 6 But it is not difficult to see that our own time is 
one which is specially fitted to appreciate and handle this aspect 
of the Christian truth. Our cultivation of the historical method, 

1 St. Luke xxiv. 25, 26, 44. 

2 Gal. iv. 9. 

3 Rom. xvi. 26. So the pages of the early apologists are, to our feeling, 
almost cumbered by the profuseness of their appeal to these Scriptures. 

4 St. John i. 1, 14, 9, 10. 

5 Ep. cii. 12. 

6 De Carne Christi vi. Eum Christum qui jam tunc et adloqui . . . hu- 
manum genus ediscebat in carnis habitu: cp. adv. Prax. xvi. ediscebat Deus 
in terris cum homimbus conversari. 



iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 1 1 1 

our historical realism or sense of the relation of persons or events 
to historical setting, our recognition of the part played in forming 
structure, function, character, by gradual process, by heredity, by 
evolution, our developed understanding of the links by which the 
parts and successions in all nature, and not least in what is human, 
are bound together, — all these go to form a habit of mind which 
in presence of such a Revelation as that of the Gospel will at once 
busy itself, whether for satisfaction, for edification, for controversy, 
or for interpretation, with the relation of the Truth to the world 
into which it came, to all from amongst which it sprung. In such 
a time it is natural that attack should try to show that facts which 
historical criticism has done much to secure, and a Life which it 
has become impossible to treat as a myth, are simply explicable 
according to the natural laws of historical causation. It is natural 
that Christianity should be explained as the flower and bloom of 
Judaism, or as sprung from the fusion of Greek and Jewish influ- 
ences in a Galilean medium. Such explanations may not be new, 
but they are urged with new resources and a more subtle inge- 
nuity. They have the advantage of being the sort of explanations 
which are naturally most congenial to the time. But out of the 
very stress of such attacks may come a special corroboration of 
Christian truth. The experiment is crucial : it can hardly be 
expected that attack of this kind can ever command greater skill 
and resource than it does at present. If therefore it should be 
proved to fail ; if we are able to look men in the face and ask 
whether, when all allowance is made for the subtle * chemistries ? 
of history and for the paradoxical way in which historical results 
spring from what precedes them, it is possible to think that Jesus 
Christ and His religion were a mere growth from antecedents, — 
then we have here the prospect of such a confirmation of faith as 
no age less historically scientific could, in that kind, give and 
receive. 

But this negative result, great as its value may be, can only be 
part of what Christian science may yield in this sphere for the 
elucidation and support of faith. It should surely be able to 
display with greater breadth and delicacy than ever before that 
correspondence between the Revelation of Christ and what went 
before it, which was of old indicated by saying that Christ came 
in the * fulness of the time.' It should be able to enhance, and 
not (as men fear) to impair, the evidence of a Divine presence 
and influence, preparing for that which was to come, moulding 
the plastic material of history for a ' far-off Divine event.' It may 
seem as if this was not so. It may seem, for example, as if the 



1 1 2 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

severity and activity of historical and linguistic criticism had 
dimmed the clearness of those correspondences between prophetic 
utterances spoken centuries before Christ and the points in Him 
or His work whereby they were fulfilled, which were once so clear. 
It may seem, it is evidently true, that stricter canons of interpreta- 
tion forbid for us that unbounded use of the happy expedient of 
allegory which could make everything in the Old Testament speak 
of Christ. But even if this were so (and with regard to prophecies 
we only partially grant it), is there no countervailing gain to 
reckon ? The hand of God may be seen in what is marvellous, 
startling, exceptional, unexplained. Can it not be seen as dis- 
tinctly and as persuasively in what is orderly, steadfast, intelligible, 
and where our reason, made in God's likeness, can follow along in 
some degree with the how and the why of His working? It was 
Christ's will to give special signs, yet the curiosity which * sought 
after a sign ' was not honored by Christ like that wisdom which 
' discerned the signs of the times,' and so could see the force of 
the special signs that were given because it saw them in their true 
moral and spiritual context. 1 Have we any reason to hope that 
our time may be suffered to do (and even be doing) something 
for the interpretation of the witness of history to Christ which has 
not been done before, and which is even an advance upon what 
has been done? Let us consider for a moment (in order to 
answer this question) what it is which specially engrosses the 
interest and admiration of all of us in the different branches of 
modern study and inquiry. It is the beauty of process. The 
practical men among us watch process in its mechanical forms as 
contrived by invention. The naturalists and the men of science 
have to an extraordinary extent developed our perception of it in 
nature; they show us its range, and its incredible delicacy, flexi- 
bility, and intricacy ; they show us its enormous patience in the 
unceasing yet age-long movements which by microscopic or less 
than microscopic changes accumulate the coal, or lessen the 
mountain ; they show us the wonderful power of adaptation by 
which it accommodates itself to surroundings, and appropriates 
and transforms them to its need. The embryologist develops its 
wonders as it makes ' the bones to grow in the womb of her that 
is with child.' And the historians in their sphere do the like : it 
is for them, if not the beginning and end of their work, at least 
the most powerful of their methods, to show the processes by 
which institutions, customs, opinions, rise and decline ; to arrange 

1 St. Matt. xi. 4, 5 ; xii. 39 ; xvi. 3. 



iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 1 1 3 

the facts so as to display on their chart the steps of growth, the 
stages of decay ; to show influences blending to form events, and 
parting again to destroy or re-shape them. 

There is beauty in all this, more than we can, perhaps, alto- 
gether analyze or explain. As living beings we sympathize with 
the life and movement of it all (or, as in the case of intricate 
machinery, with the imitation of life) compared with what stands 
stark, solid, unchanging ; as intelligent beings we revel and delight 
in its intricacy, and, further, we are gratified by the way in which 
it subdues with explanation what would be anomalous, abrupt, 
motiveless, in the way of change or event. It gives us something 
like the pleasure which we take in the beauty of the exquisite 
subtle curves and shaded surfaces of a Raphael figure compared 
with the rough outline of a Diirer woodcut. But we could not 
long rest in the admiration of mere process, whether delicate or 
colossal. There is a rational element present in, or controlling, 
our sense of beauty, which asks whence and whither, which de- 
mands unity in detail ; and this finds altogether new and delightful 
gratification when it can see a relation, a meaning, a grouping, a 
symmetry, of which processes are the ministers and instruments. 

It is, then, this idea of beauty in process that we bring with us 
as we approach to behold the facts and method of God's Redemp- 
tive Work. It is altogether too strong in us to be left behind as 
we cross the threshold of this region ; it is too much connected 
with all our thinking and experience. It is very possible that 
there may be exaggeration about it in us : and it is indispensable 
for us to recognize this, 'le de'faut de notre qualite.' But all the 
same we cannot disown, though we must control, what is so 
specially our own. And if our love of process is prepared to be 
critical, it is also prepared to be gratified : and there is opened a 
prospect of fresh witness to the truth of the unchanging Gospel, 
if it should be found that its introduction into this world is ushered 
in by all the beauty of process, with all the grandeur of slow 
unhasting preparation, the surprises of gradual transformation, the 
delicacies of combination, which process allows. 

Such a sight is much more than wonderful, and has in it, if our 
ideas of what is Divine are not very narrow, much more evidence 
of God's hand than any mere wonder can have. But it is as 
wonderful as anything can be. And if we still plead that our sense 
of wonder stipulates for exceptionalness, it has its own way of satis- 
fying this, — the way of uniqueness. For those features which we 
admire in process are capable, if combined with a certain degree 
of grandeur, completeness, and particularity, of conveying to us the 

8 



1 14 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

impression of a unique thing. We may dismiss as a dialectical 
refinement the objection which has been made that, as is doubtless 
true, ' everything is unique.' None the less, there is a meaning 
in our ordinary language when it applies the epithet ' unique ' to 
certain persons, classes, or things. A man of science may prop- 
erly speak of a certain uniqueness in the way in which natural 
conditions are combined so as to make life possible ; a historian 
will certainly miss truth if he does not recognize a special unique- 
ness in certain historical epoch-making moments. In propor- 
tion-as we believe in Mind ordering the things of nature and 
history, such uniqueness will have speaking significance. And as 
uniqueness has its degrees, and rises according to the scale, 
quantity, character, and completeness of that which goes to make 
it up, so its significance will rise proportionately, until at last, 
arriving at uniqueness, which seems to us absolute, we gain evi- 
dence that there is before us a Supreme Thing, a true centre to 
the world. The evidence is not indeed demonstrative, but it is 
in a high degree corroborative, and it is the highest which history 
can offer. It is this evidence of uniqueness which, as it seems to 
me, we of the present day may with special fitness seek, and shall 
with special welcome find, — 

( i ) In the shaping of world-history towards the Christian era. 

(2) In the special preparation of the Jewish nation. 

Within the compass of a paper like the present, it is impossible 
to do more than indicate the lines which, even without any high 
degree of special education, a Christian's thought may travel in 
tracing the Divine work of preparation and witness. 

I. In the first part of our inquiry the distinction between an 
outward and an inward working suggests itself as convenient, 
though necessarily imperfect : the one consisting in a moulding of 
the material facts of history, — such as the geographical distribu- 
tion of peoples, and the political and social order; the other, in a 
like use of the changes in thought, feeling, and the like. 

(1) It can never be altogether too hackneyed to dwell on the 
strange value to the world's history of the two peninsulas which we 
know as Greece and Italy, thrust out into that Mediterranean Sea, 
which was itself so remarkable as a centre and ' medium ' of the 
western world, binding its many nations together. They share 
with other lands of the temperate zone all its possibilities of hardy 
and vigorous life ; but, besides this, their sky and sea, their con- 
veniences and difficulties, had a special stimulus to give to their 
early inhabitants. They were extraordinarily well suited to be the 
seed-plots of civilization. And these seed-plots were aptly fertil- 



iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 1 1 5 

ized, first by the Phoenicians, — those carrier-birds of antiquity, 
dropping seed along the Mediterranean coasts, — and then by the 
happy contact between Greece and the other Greece opposite, to 
which the island bridges of the y^Egaean linked it, where, on the 
narrow strip of coast plain and rich river valley between the sea 
and the high plateaus of Asia Minor, the Ionians enjoyed, as 
Herodotus says, 1 the fairest climate in the world. Upon this 
debouched, with the rivers from the interior, the highways along 
which travelled westward the civilization or the power of the dimly 
known but highly important early Phrygian monarchy, or from yet 
farther east, of the mighty Assyria. The recent discoveries of Pro- 
fessor Ramsay and others re-interpret and emphasize to us this 
early connection between the Asian lands and Greece in Europe, 
of which, the Lion Gate of Mycenae is a monument. What Greece 
thus took with her left hand she could pass across with her right to 
yet another Greece — ' Great Greece' — in Sicily and Southern 
Italy. But we may easily fail to recognize how much all this deli- 
cate and tender growth depended on favorable circumstance, and 
we cannot too carefully mark how space was made awhile for it to 
spring. The ' hills stood about ' both peninsulas on the North 
to shelter them from intrusion ; but this barrier, sufficient for ordi- 
nary times, would hardly have resisted the heavy thrust of the 
later pressure of population from the East and Northeast, which, 
when it did begin, so nearly crushed Rome, and which, if it had 
come earlier, might have easily stifled Greek and Roman civiliza- 
tion in the cradle. The reader of the Persian wars will watch 
almost with awe within how little Greece came of what appeared 
alike to Asiatic and Greek a certain subjection to the Persian. A 
difference of twenty years earlier, the chance of a different temper 
in the little Athenian people, the use by Darius of the methods of 
Xerxes, would, humanly speaking, have decided the other way the 
fate of western civilization. It is easier again to admire than to 
explain the happy fortune which brought the mountain kingdom of 
Macedon to its moment of aggression just too late to hurt the 
flowering and fruitage of Greece, just in time to carry its seed 
broadcast over Eastern, Syrian, and Egyptian lands. From all the 
sequence of the Grasco-Roman history which follows, and in which 
nothing is more important to all the purposes of Providence than 
the simple fact of the order of these two, — Greek first, Roman sec- 
ond, — we can here select only one feature of capital importance, 
viz., the transformation of a world intensely localized and sub- 

1 Hdt., i. 142. 



1 1 6 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

divided into one as singularly united and homogeneous. Follow 
St. Paul and see his circuits, watch him claiming the safeguard of 
the same Roman citizenship in the Macedonian town and in the 
capital of Palestine, laying hold at Caesarea on the horns of a cen- 
tral tribunal of justice at Rome, borne thither by the sails of the 
carrying trade in the ' ship of Alexandria,' meditating a journey 
into Spain, numbering among his Roman converts, as seems prob- 
able, one who had a direct connection with Roman Britain, writing 
in the same Greek to Rome and to the highlanders of Galatia, 
never' crossed in his journeys by any track of war, never stopped 
by any challenge of frontier or custom-house : these are so many 
object-lessons to show what the ' Pax Romana ' and the Roman 
unity of power and organization imported for the growth of a 
world-religion. This was the time when it could be complained 
that it was impossible to flee from the Caesar's wrath, because the 
Caesar owned the world. And to make the impression more dis- 
tinct, let the eye travel backward a little, or forward a little : back- 
ward into the second or even the first century b. c, when this 
same Mediterranean world was still in greater part an unconsoli- 
dated chaos of political debris ; when the tumult of the Macedonian 
and Syrian wars of Rome and then of her desolating civil strife 
filled the world with noise and occupied its thought and destroyed 
its peace ; when the sea was impassable because of pirates, and 
when the West was still in great part unsubdued and formidable 
barbarism ; or forward, across the space during which the Gospel 
had spread its influence and struck its roots and won its power, to 
the time so soon following, when the lands that had known no war 
were again traversed by the armies of rival emperors, and the bar- 
barians began to dismember the West, and the gloom of a great 
fear preoccupied men's hearts. To say nothing of the Middle 
Ages, what unity of the Mediterranean world and the lands affili- 
ated to it has the whole of later history got to show that can com- 
pare for a moment with the unity of the early Empire, focussed in 
its cosmopolitan capital, Rome? 

And in this there is much more than a mechanical provision for 
the progress of a world-religion. It is not merely that its heralds 
find a complete facility of communication, peaceful conditions, 
and a ' lingua franca ' ready for their use. We must realize how 
the unity had been obtained. It had been by pulverizing separate 
nationalities, separate patriotisms, separate religions ; by destroy- 
ing or leaving only in a municipal form the centres round which 
human energy and loyalty had been wont to gather. Thus the 
world had been turned into that ' cold and icy plain ' of which M. 



IV. Preparation in History for Christ. 1 1 7 

Renan speaks. And it is not too much to say that this process 
had destroyed just so many barriers to the entrance of Christianity. 
We have only to realize what had been previously the universal 
character of the worships of the western world, viz., that they had 
been local, the common and exclusive possession of the citizens of 
one place or state, and inextricably bound up with the being and 
welfare of that particular community. Such religions, and people 
bred under them, would have met Christianity, not so much with 
criticism of its doctrines, or with rival doctrines of their own, as 
with ideas and a frame of mind so alien to a spiritual and universal 
religion like the Gospel that it would have found no foothold in 
attacking them. Conceive the force with which what even in the 
second century after Christ the heathen objector urged, ' It is 
not creditable to alter the customs handed down to us from our 
fathers,' 1 would have come from the Roman of the earlier Repub- 
lic, or the Greek of the times of freedom. Nay, we may without 
rashness hazard the conjecture that had it been possible for the 
Gospel to overcome these conditions it would have done so prema- 
turely and with loss ; that they were in their time and place minis- 
ters of good ; that they were bound up with that vigorous energy 
of development within one small limited horizon, by which, as 
we shall see, the preparation of the heathen world was carried 
out. 

It was the negative aid of the Empire to Christianity that it 
destroyed these. But it lent more positive help. It created a 
demand, or at least a need, for a universal religion. Of this 
there are several proofs. The religious phenomena of the time 
other than Christianity supply the first. There is an attempt, or 
more than one attempt, to provide such a religion. There is the 
attempt by way of comprehension, of making all the gods live 
together as joint inhabitants of a common Pantheon. There is the 
attempt by way of construction, in the worship of the one Power 
about which there was no doubt, the Goddess Rome, and of the 
Emperor, her deified representative. There is also, we may perhaps 
add, the attempt by way of philosophic thought. For philosophy 
at this time had a religious bent which increased not improbably 
as the circulation of Christian thought stole unknown through the 
veins of society ; and it felt after the One Being whose Personal 
existence and Fatherhood it waveringly discerned, but whom yet 
it could not steadily distinguish from a personified order of nature. 
Such a religious idea, needed to complete Cicero's commonwealth 

1 Clem. Alex., Protrept, ex. init. 



1 i 8 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

of the Universe comprehending gods and men, may be seen with 
increasing clearness in Seneca, Epictetus, and Aurelius. The need 
of a universal religion is thus directly shown. But other proofs, as 
clear though less direct, are to be drawn from the other depart- 
ments of human thought. For literature was already a unity, into 
which whatever the genius of provincials like Lucan, or Seneca, 
or Pliny contributed was gathered up. And it is a commonplace 
that the greatest constructive result of the imperial period was the 
creation or development of a universal code of law. 

(2) In what has been last said we have almost crossed the ima- 
ginary line by which we were to divide the preparation in external 
fact from that which was more inward in thought and feeling. To 
deal with this latter may seem almost ridiculous ; since to do so 
must involve the presumption of summarizing in a few lines the 
drift of the literature and thought of antiquity. Yet, in the briefest 
words, it may be possible to suggest a few true outlines of the 
shape which an account of that drift should take. It would cer- 
tainly represent the mental history of the classical world in its rela- 
tion to the Gospel as supplying a double preparation, positive and 
negative, — a positive preparation by involving ideas which the Gos- 
pel could work into its own fabric, or a frame of mind which would 
make for it a suitable ' nidus ' and a receptive soil ; a negative 
preparation by the breakdown of human nature's own constructive 
and speculative efforts, and by the room thus left for a revelation 
which would unite the broken and useless fragments of thought 
and minister to unsatisfied needs. And of these the negative 
seems the more predominant and the more direct. In so saying 
we are guided by what appears to be the teaching of the New 
Testament. It seems as though the main upshot of that time was, 
and was meant to be, the failure of the world ' by wisdom ' x to find 
the truth ; though when this has been recognized and acknowl- 
edged, then the world might find, as we may find, that all the 
while in this unattaining and abortive thought God had put 
impulses from His own wisdom, and prepared materials for His 
own coming work. It is the typical history of the ' natural man j ' 
and though what is primary and indispensable is that the natural 
man should learn the poverty and misery of his own state, and be 
ready to die to his life, yet the natural man too is the true though 
perverted work of God, and in his thoughts and instincts, his 
emotions and speculations, must be found a witness to which the 
revelation will appeal, and a response which it will elicit. It is 

1 1 Cor i, 21. 



iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 119 

impossible not to follow the track so suggested, and to see in the 
early stages of Greek life the lusty youth-time of the natural man. 
Casting off the bright and truthful simplicity, and the happy story- 
telling of its childhood, it begins (we speak of the times between 
600 and 450 b. c.) to try its young energies upon the problems of 
the world ; it suggests its explanations, quick, ingenious, one-sided, 
changing, of how the world came to be : ' it came from water,' 
1 from air,' ' from fire ; ' ' it came from the dance of atoms ; ' ' nay, 
but these give us only the how ; it came from something more than 
these, it came from mind ; ' ' are you sure what it is ? fix upon any 
part of it, and you will find it slip through your fingers, for all is 
change, and change is all we know : ' these are the quick premieres 
ebauches of its young speculation. But already there is a sound of 
alarm in the air. That challenge asking whether there was an ' it ' 
at all ; and if so, whether by parity of cavil there was any solidity 
in the other assumptions of thought, in 'good ' and 'evil,' 'truth' 
and ' falsehood,' ' beauty ' and 4 ugliness ;' or at least anything 
beyond such mere relative and convenient meaning as there is in 
' big ' or ' little,' ' thick ' or ' thin,' ' wet ' or ' dry,' — this sobers men. 
Thought feels its own dangers. It must try its hand more seriously 
at some true constructive work ; and so there follows that great 
period in which, steadied by the strong grip and sharp discipline of 
the great prophet of natural conscience and natural instinct, Socra- 
tes, it addresses itself to its great task of wringing her secret from 
the world. It is done and necessarily done in the sheer self- 
reliance of the unaided mind, yet of the mind in the fullest sense of 
the word ; not the mere critical understanding, but the whole spir- 
itual and rational energy of the man, not disowning its depen- 
dence on a discipline of character and a severe and painful training 
of its own powers. The results, so splendid and yet so inadequate, 
so rich in great intuitions and suggestions, so patient and success- 
ful in much of its detail, is preserved to us in the work of Plato and 
Aristotle. Christian thought can never be interested in disparaging 
that work ; Christian thinkers at different times have done special 
honor to different aspects of it ; and the position of Aristotle in the 
works of Dante, and of Aquinas, and in the frescoes of the Spanish 
chapel, is the sign of the ungrudged admiration given by what in 
our modern way we might regard as among the least appreciative 
and discriminating of Christian times. But the most ungrudging 
admiration cannot prevent our seeing, and history compels us to 
see, what it lacked. It lacked a foundation upon a Rock. It had 
the certainty, if certainty at all, which belongs to profound intui- 
tions and to a wide interpretation of experience, not that which 



120 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

makes a definite, settled, and, above all, communicable conviction. 
All the while narrower, pettier, more captious, or more ordinary 
minds had been asking ''what is truth ' in a very different spirit; 
had displayed the independence and captiousness of youth, and not 
its hopeful and trustful creativeness. And more and more this 
lower element began to prevail. When it became a question, not 
of projecting systems which should impress and absorb the higher 
minds of a few generations, but of providing that which should pass 
on with men, the common run of men, into the advancing years, 
and stand the strain of the world's middle life ; then it was found 
that the human mind unaided was more powerful to destroy than 
to build or to maintain. The dark horse of Plato's chariot pulled 
down his fellow ; in the unaided human understanding the critical 
faculty proved stronger than the constructive ; without the point of 
attachment in a central truth to which men's high thoughts could 
reach and cling, or (to change the figure) without a clearly dis- 
closed goal of truth towards which they could be seen to tend and 
converge, they could not maintain or justify themselves ; ' the car- 
nal mind ' was against them and unworthy of them ; as regards any 
real adoption of them by mankind for fruitful and trustworthy con- 
victions, they passed away, according to that law of which the 
modern poet speaks : — 

' Eternal hopes are man's, 
Which when they should maintain themselves aloft 
Want due consistence : like a pillar of smoke, 
That with majestic energy from earth 
Rises, but, having reached the thinner air, 
Melts and dissolves, and is no longer seen.' l 

We shall not be wrong in saying that the course of philosophy 
after Aristotle displayed increasingly the collapse of the experiment 
of speculative self-reliance. Scepticism was not confined to the 
' Sceptics,' nor even shared only by the Epicureans ; it deeply 
underlay the philosophy of the Stoics. But as with advancing 
life men, baffled in their early sanguineness, fall back (both for 
good and evil) and content themselves with the energies of prac- 
tical life, so the mind of that day, baffled and despairing of the 
speculative problem, did not abandon, but transferred, its self- 
reliance ; men threw themselves with a sort of defiance into the 
organization of conduct ; ' imperturbableness ' and ' self-sufficiency ' 
became watchwords of their thought. 2 This is the character of 
Stoicism ; this explains its vogue and wide indirect influence ; its 

3 Wordsworth, Excursion, iv. 2 'Arapa^la (Epicurean) : avrapKeia. 



iv. Preparation in History for Christ, 121 

curious likeness to its apparently quite alien contemporary, Epicu- 
reanism, in a common cultivation of self-sufficingness ; and, finally, 
its ready alliance with the natural tendencies of Roman character 
when it passed from Greece to Rome. 

Here again was a great experiment, which had no mean success. 
We admire almost with awe its unsparing thoroughness, its austerity, 
its unworldliness, its courage, its endurance. In its later forms, 
when some power has touched it with gentleness, we yield it even a 
warmer and tenderer admiration. Only what we cannot do is to 
disguise its failure as a great spiritual experiment. We cannot for- 
get how it left the mass of men untouched, how it concentrated 
strength by what it neglected of human sympathy and effort, how 
it revealed a disease and palsy of human nature which it could not 
cure, how at its heart it had no certainty of conviction to give 
peace and to resist the forces of decay. Humanity will never, 
perhaps, wind itself higher. But it was a height on which human 
strength is insufficient to stand. There lacked a sure word of 
truth ; the joy and fruitfulness of an inspiration ; a grace which 
could minister to the weakness, as well as summon the forces, of 
human nature. We cannot be blind to its failure unless we share 
it ; unless, that is, we are trying to satisfy ourselves by some philo- 
sophy of life which misses its secrets, has no key to many of its 
problems, and at heart despairs of its solution. The experiment 
of moral self-reliance, then, failed in its turn. 

But we spoke of a positive as well as a negative upshot to all 
this Gentile history ; a positive contribution to the preparation for 
Christ. Where shall we look for this? Surely alongside of, and 
in the same plane with, the failures. If one chief result of the 
history of the ancient world was to exhibit the insufficiency of 
man's efforts to find truth and righteousness and life, this must 
be completely shown in proportion as the efforts were noble, and 
therefore in proportion as they realized (though, at the moment, 
only for disappointment) the capacities, the possibilities, the true 
desires and ideals of man. If man the race, like man the indi- 
vidual, was finally to find salvation by dying to himself, to his own 
natural man, he could only do this when it had been adequately 
and magnificently proved both that he could not save himself, and 
how splendidly worth saving he was. He must do his best, that 
he may despair of his best. Do we not feel that this is just what 
was worked out by the histories of Greece and Rome ? They are 
splendid experiments of human power. Diverse in their method, 
they combine in this result. In Greece the experiment is by way 
of spontaneity, of free lively development, conditioned only by its 



122 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

own instincts of taste and beauty. And Rome represents the 
alternative plan of seeking strength by discipline, by subordination, 
by distrust of novelty, by sacrifice of individuality to the corporate 
life, and of sentiment and opinion to the rule of law. Both realize 
deathless types of matured human life, of its beauty, its brilliant 
graces, its dignity, its honor, its strength. Perhaps, according to 
the one-sidedness which limits so severely the works and lives of 
men, .it might have been impossible that these possibilities of his 
nature should have been first realized with the same solidity and 
fulness in presence of those mighty truths, speaking of what was 
above man, which brooded over the history of the Jews and came 
forth into the world with the Gospel. Yet they are indispensable 
to the fulness of the Christian work ; they are the human material ; 
and that material must be first-rate in its kind. We owe it per- 
haps permanently to Greece and Rome that we recognize fully the 
grace of God's original workmanship in man, the validity of his 
instincts, his individual value, the sacredness and strength of all 
his natural social bonds, the wisdom and power possessed by his 
incorporated life. These are things which we could never have 
realized if all the world had been brought up in the barbarous 
societies of ancient Europe or under the great despotisms of Egypt 
and Asia. The religions of Asia may perhaps show us by contrast 
the immense importance to a religion of being able to build with 
sound and adequate materials on the human side. That Greece 
and Rome did contribute specially in this way to the work of the 
true religion, may be shown by the way in which men have again 
and again turned back to these original sources for fresh impulses 
of liberty or vigor. 

But these things had their day and passed. The age of Pericles 
and of Demosthenes, the great days of the Roman Republic, are 
only epochs in the history, long past at the era of our Lord. 
We look to see whether there is any positive preparation for Him 
and His Gospel in the whole drift of that history, and especially 
in tendencies which took a developed form closer to the era of 
Christianity. 1 

General and popular impressions about the character and course 
of the history will put us on the track of a true answer. It is 
impossible to look at the history of the classical v/orld without get- 

1 The words 'era of Christianity' are used intentionally rather than the 
more precise 'era of Christ,' because anything which (without being influ- 
enced unless in the most impalpable way by Christianity) prepared the world 
through the first and even the second century of the era to receive the 
Gospel may be fairly included as preparation for the revelation of Christ. 



IV. Preparation in History for Christ. 1 2 3 

ting a double impression, that it is a history of failure and degen- 
eracy, and yet that it is a history of bettering and progress. If we 
take the world at the Christian era, the times of political brilliancy 
and energy are over, and men are sinking into a uniformity of 
servility and stagnation ; morally the ancient severity is lost, and 
the laws of Augustus are feebly coping with the results of a general 
dissoluteness as to morality and marriage ; economically society is 
disfigured by a vast slave system, by the disappearance of honest 
and thriving free labor, and by great developments of luxury and 
pauperism; in literature, though it is the 'golden age,' the signs 
are not wanting, in artificiality and the excessive study of form, of 
imminent rapid decline into the later rhetorical culture ; in philo- 
sophy speculation had run itself out into scepticism and self-destruc- 
tion ; and in religion a disbelief in the ancient gods and a doubt 
of all Divine providence is matter of open profession. And yet 
there is a bettering. The laws of the Empire become a model of 
humanity, equitableness, and simplicity. Seneca and Epictetus 
rise to thoughts of moral purity and sublimity and delicacy which 
at times seem hardly unworthy of the New Testament ; and their 
humane and comprehensive ideas have cast off the limitations 
which the narrow life of Greek cities set to those of their greater 
predecessors. 

Here then is a great clearing of the stage, and a great predis- 
posing of thought and sentiment, for a religion which proclaimed 
a good tidings for all men without distinction of ' Jew or Greek, 
Barbarian and Scythian, bond or free ; ' for a religion of compas- 
sion ; for a religion wholly spiritual and unpolitical. There are 
traces distinct and widespread of special tendencies to such a 
religion, and they are connected with the best side of the life of 
the time. The enormous diffusion of the ' collegia ' or clubs, in 
which the members were drawn together without distinction of 
rank, or even of free and slave, in a partly religious bond, shows 
the instinct of the time feeling for a religion of brotherhood. 
There is a delicacy of family life as seen in Plutarch, in Pliny, in 
Fronto, which shows readiness for a religion such as should regen- 
erate the simple instincts and relations of humanity. In the posi- 
tion and function of the philosophers (who sometimes half remind 
one of mendicant friars, 1 sometimes of the confessor or chaplain 
in families of rank, in their relation to education and to the vicis- 
situdes of later life) there is implied a concentration of thought 
and interest upon character and upon the discipline of individual 

1 Capes, Age of Antonines. 



1 24 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

life, a sensibility to spiritual need, which all indicates a ground pre- 
pared for Christian influence. And, finally, whether it be from the 
stealing in of Eastern influences, or from a reaction against the 
cold scepticism of Ciceronian times, or from a half-political, half- 
genuine sense of the necessity of religion to society, or from a 
sort of awed impression created by the marvellous fortune of 
Rome, or from the steady impact of the clear strong deep religious 
faith of the Jews scattered everywhere, and everywhere, as we 
know, to an extraordinary extent leavening society, or, as time 
went on, from a subtle influence of Christianity not yet accepted 
or even consciously known, — there was, it is notorious, a return 
towards religion in the mind of men. The temples were again 
thronged ; priests became philosophers. In Neo-Platonism thought 
again looks upward, and the last phase of Greek philosophy was, 
in the phrase of the dry and dispassionate Zeller, 1 ( a philosophy of 
Revelation ' which sought knowledge partly in the inner revelation 
of the Deity and partly in religious tradition. This movement was 
indeed a rival of Christianity ; it came to put out some of its 
strength in conscious rivalry, or it tried in Gnostic heresies to 
rearrange Christianity on its own lines ; but it was the result and 
witness of a disposition of men's hearts which made way for the 
Gospel. 

It was not, then, merely true that the failures of the heathen 
world left it empty, hungering, distrustful of itself; nor merely that 
the world of that particular epoch gave extraordinary facilities of an 
outward kind for the diffusion of a world-religion ; but also that in 
some of its most characteristic and deepest workings, in thoughts and 
dispositions which it had purchased at a great cost of ancient glories 
and liberties and of all that was proud and distinctive in Greek and 
Roman religion, there was that which would make men ready for 
Christianity and cause it to be to them, as it could not have been 
to their ancestors, intelligible, possible, and congenial. 

II. Dr. Westcott has drawn, in a useful phrase, the invaluable 
distinction between a tendency towards, and a tendency to produce, 
the truth of Christianity. 2 

1 Philosophy of the Greeks: Eclectics, p. 20 (tr. Alleyne). 

2 Gospel of the Resurrection (3d ed.), p. 72. It is interesting to notice 
that according to so dispassionate an observer as M. Gaston Boissier (La 
Religion Romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins), who has done so much to trace 
the better tendencies of the imperial period, the evidence suggests some such 
distinction, even as regards some of the main practical results of Christi- 
anity. For example, there was a tendency to ameliorate slavery on princi- 
ples of general humanity, but there was no hint of a possibility of an end to 
slavery. There were some signs of mutual interest between classes, but no 



IV. Preparation in History for Christ. 125 

If we have been able to trace a real shaping of the lines inward 
and outward of the world's order disposing it for a true religion, 
the impression which this makes on us must be enormously increased 
if (r) we can see that that religion, when it comes, is most obviously 
a thing which comes to the Gentile world, and does not grow out of 
it either by blending of tendencies, or by constructive individual 
genius ; and if (2) we are able to indicate another and perfectly 
distinct course of shaping and preparation which at the required 
moment yielded the material and equipment for the religion which 
was to go out upon the world. 

That this was so is in a sense upon the face of history. The 
Christian Church, it has been said, appeared at first as a Jewish 
sect. ' The salvation ' Christ declared was ' of the Jews.' He 
came ( ' not to destroy but) to fulfil ' the system amidst which He 
arose. Such sayings put us upon the track of a special preparation 
for the Gospel. Let us follow it. And (as the phrase is chosen to 
imply) we look here for something kindred indeed in many of its 
methods to that general preparation which we have hitherto traced, 
but yet more coherent, positive, and concentrated. For we pass 
in a sense at this point (to use language of the day), from the prep- 
aration of an environment suitable to the Gospel, to a preparation 
of the organism itself. Such language is obviously open to criti- 
cisms and misconceptions of more kinds than one. But it is suffi- 
ciently defensible historically and theologically to justify us in gain- 
ing the clearness which it gives. 

I shall attempt to present the signs of this preparation by con- 
sidering successively these three points : — 

(1) The relations between Israel and the world at the Christian 
era. 

(2) The fitness of Israel to be the seed-plot of a world-religion, 
and of the world-religion given by Christ. 

(3) The character of the process by which the Israel, so fitted, 
and so placed, had come to be. 

(1) Many a reader of Mommsen's History of Rome will have 
been surprised by finding that the ideal political construction' 
which the writer's knowledge and imagination have, ascribed to 
Caesar was to consist of three elements, — the Roman, the Hellenic, 
and the Jewish. 1 Yet striking as the paradox is, it is chiefly in 
the facts themselves. Whether we look at the ethnological char- 
progress towards the effective appearance of a true philanthrophy such as 
the Christian. In such cases, however, the validity of the distinctions must 
be debatable and fluctuating. It is absolute as regards the Incarnation. 

1 Bk. V. c. xi. The New Monarchy 



126 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

acter of the Jews amidst a system whose strength is from the West ; 
or at their historical position, as a nation in some sense in deca- 
dence, with a history of independence and glories long lost ; or at 
the minuteness of their original seat, and its insignificance at that 
time as (ordinarily) a subordinate district under the Roman pro- 
vince of Syria, it is alike surprising that it should be possible to 
speak of them as the third factor of the Roman Empire. Yet, in 
the main, the same surprise is created by any acquaintance with 
the. circumstances of the Jewish Dispersion, as it may be learnt 
from easily accessible books, such as Edersheim's or Schurer's. 1 
There is first the ubiquity of the race, — testified alike by Josephus, 
Strabo, and Philo, and by the witness of inscriptions. They are 
everywhere, and everywhere in force throughout the Roman world. 
Outside the Roman world their great colonies in Babylon and 
Mesopotamia are another headquarters of the race. They are 
an eighth part (one million) of the population of Egypt ; they 
yield ten thousand at the least to one massacre in Antioch. To 
numbers and ubiquity they add privilege in the shape of rights 
and immunities, begun by the policy of the successors of Alex- 
ander, but vigorously taken up and pushed by Rome as early 
as 139 b. c, greatly developed by Caesar, round whose pyre at 
Rome they wept, and maintained by the almost consistent pol- 
icy of the earlier Empire ; rights of equal citizenship in the 
towns where they lived, and equal enjoyment of the boons granted 
to citizens ; rights of self-government and internal administra- 
tion ; and rights or immunities guarding their distinctive customs, 
such as their observance of the Sabbath or their transmission 
of tribute to Jerusalem. The opportunities thus secured from with- 
out were vigorously turned to account by their trading instinct, 
their tenacity, their power of living at a low cost, and above all 
by their admirable freemasonry among themselves, which bound 
Jews throughout the world into a society of self-help, and must 
have greatly assisted the enterprises which depend on facility of 
information, communication, and movement. So far we merely 
get an impression of their importance. But there are other points 
which, while they greatly heighten this impression, add to it that of 
remarkable peculiarity. To ask what was their influence plunges 
us into a tumult of paradoxes. They had, for example, every- 
where the double character of citizens and strangers, speaking the 
language of the countries where they dwelt, ' being Antiochenes,' 
as Josephus says, ' at Antioch, Ephesians at Ephesus/ and so 

1 Edersheim's Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah; Schiirer, History of 
the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ. 



iv. Preparation in History for Christ. \2J 

forth ; possessing and using the rights and franchises of citizens, 
and yet every one of them counting the Holy Land his country and 
Jerusalem his capital ; respecting the Sanhedrin of Jerusalem as the 
supreme authority of the race ; sending up their tribute annually, 
flocking thither themselves in vast numbers to keep the feasts, or 
again not seldom returning there to die. They possessed in fact 
the combined advantages of the most elastic diffusion, and the 
strongest national concentration. Such a position could hardly 
make their relations to their neighbors entirely simple or harmo- 
nious. It ' involved an internal contradiction.' 1 It could not but 
be felt that while enjoying all the advantages of citizenship, their 
hearts were really elsewhere. From all the religious and social 
side of the common life, which in the ancient world was far less 
separable from the political than it is now, they were sensibly 
aliens. They were visibly making the best of two inconsistent 
positions. And accordingly the irritation against them in the 
towns (we have a glimpse of it in Acts xix. 34) and the ensuing 
encroachments and riots, form as chronic a feature of the position, 
as does their protection by the Empire. But the causes of irrita- 
tion went wider and deeper. It has been said that ' the feelings 
cherished towards the Jews throughout the entire Grseco-Roman 
w r orld were not so much those of hatred as of pure contempt.' 2 
Their exterior was doubtless unlovely ; a Jewry, as M. Kenan 
reminds us, was perhaps not more attractive in ancient than in 
modern times. But what was even more offensive, especially to 
that cosmopolitan age, and what struck it as altogether the domi- 
nant characteristic of the Jews, was their stubborn and inhuman 
perversity. They would be unlike all the rest of the world. Taci- 
tus has even formulated this for them as the principle guiding 
their whole action, reduced to practice in details which were sin- 
gularly well fitted to exhibit its offensiveness. 3 His picture should 
be read by any one who wishes to realize how cultivated opinion 
thought of them ; and, even if evidence were lacking, we can see 
that this was just the kind of dislike to be shared by all classes, 
cultivated and uncultivated alike. Yet it is against the background 
of this intense prejudice, ever more scornful and irritated as it was 
exasperated by the incidents of daily contact at close quarters, that 
we have to paint the phenomena, as striking and as abundantly 
testified, of the vast and penetrating influence of the Jews over 
their neighbors. These also lie upon the surface. In very various 
degrees multitudes (of whom women doubtless formed a consider- 
able majority) adopted the customs and brought themselves into 

1 Schurer, II. ii. 273. 2 Schiirer, II. ii. 297. 3 Tac, Hist., v. 4. 



128 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

connection with the religion of the Jews. The boasts or claims of 
Josephus, who refers any sceptical contemporary to ' his own coun- 
try or his own family,' are confirmed by the admissions of classical 
writers, by the indignant sarcasms directed against the converts, 
and by the vivid touches in the Acts of the Apostles. 1 ' Victi vic- 
toribus leges dederunt ' is the strong phrase of Seneca, and it was 
a very persuasive influence which could cause it to be said that in 
Damascus 'nearly the whole female population was devoted to 
Judaism ; ' which could give St. Paul's Jewish opponents in the 
towns of Greece and Asia Minor the power at one time of raising 
the mob, at another of working upon the ' chief ' and ' honorable 
women,' the ladies of the upper classes; or which could bring 
' almost the whole city ' together in a provincial town because a 
new teacher appears in the Jews' synagogue. 2 This influence had 
its results in a considerable number of actual proselytes who through 
circumcision received admission, somewhat grudging indeed and 
guarded, within the Jewish pale, but still more in a much larger 
number of adherents (the ' devout persons,' ' devout Greeks etc., 
of the Acts) 3 attracted by the doctrines, and acquainted with the 
Scriptures of Israel, who formed a fringe of partly leavened Gentile 
life round every synagogue. 

We hardly need evidence to show us that to this picture of the 
influence of Jew over Gentile, there need to be added another 
which will show how the subtle, persuasive, and powerful culture of 
the Graeco-Roman world made itself felt upon the Jews of the 
Dispersion. The contrast between the Jews of Palestine and those 
of the Dispersion, the translation of the Scriptures into Greek, the 
rise of a literature which in different ways tried to recommend what 
was Jewish to the heathen or to fuse what was Jewish with what 
was Greek, the single figure of Philo at Alexandria, are all evi- 
dences of an influence, which must have told continually with pen- 
etrating power on all that was ablest and most thoughtful in the 
Jewish mind. It was not the least considerable result of this that 
all the great thoughts and beliefs of Israel learned to talk the lan- 
guage of the civilized world, and so acquired before the time of 
Christ an adequate and congenial vehicle. 

Such was the position of Israel at the Christian era. It was one 
which had been gradually brought about during the last three 
centuries b. c. ; but it only came to its full growth in the last few 
decades (the Jewish settlement in Rome may date from Pompey's 
time) under favor of the imperial policy and the peace of the times : 

1 Schiirer, II. ii. 308. 2 Acts xvii. 5, xiv. 5, xiii. 50, 44. 

3 Acts xiii. 43, etc. 



IV. Preparation in History for Christ. 129 

and it was soon to change ; indeed the fall of Jerusalem a. d. 70 
altered it within and without. Thus it stood complete during the 
half-century in which the work of founding the Christian Church 
throughout the Empire was accomplished, and then passed away. 
We remark upon it how admirable an organization it offered for 
the dissemination of a world-religion, originated upon Jewish soil. 
The significance of this, occurring at the time when such a religion 
actually appeared, is heightened when we observe that the position 
had continued long enough fully to try the experiment of what by 
its own forces Judaism could accomplish for the world. As St. 
James argued, 1 ' Moses had,' now for a long time, ' in every city 
them that preach him, being read in the synagogues every Sab- 
bath day ' — and it might have so gone on forever without any 
conversion of the Gentile world. That world could never have been 
drawn within a system, which, however zealous to make proselytes, 
had nothing better to offer to those whom it made than that they 
might come in, if they liked, and sit down in the lowest place, tol- 
erated rather than welcomed, dependents rather than members of 
an intensely national community, leaving father and mother and all 
that they had, not for a position of spiritual freedom, but for a 
change of earthly nationality. 

(2) But we trench upon the second question. What was the 
nation that held this position of vantage ? What signs are there 
about it which suggest a special preparation for a purposed result ? 

It is one answer to this question to say that this wonderfully 
placed people had, alone among the nations, a genuine faith, a 
genuine hope, and a genuine charity. They at least, says Seneca, 
when he complains of their influence, ' knew the reasons of their 
customs.' There was a raison d'etre to their religion. In a world 
which still kept up the forms of worship and respect for gods whose 
character and existence could not stand the criticism of its own 
best moral and religious insight, any more than that of its scepticism ; 
or which was framing for itself thoughts of Deity by intellectual 
abstraction ; or which was betraying its real ignorance of the very 
idea of God by worshipping the two great powers which, as a matter 
of fact, it knew to be mighty, Nature and the Roman Empire, — ■ 
the Jew had a faith, distinct, colossal, and unfailing, in a Living 
God, Maker of heaven and earth. This we may be sure was the 
inner secret of the true attraction which drew the hearts of such 
men as Cornelius the centurion to the despised and repulsive Jew. 
This God, they further believed, was their God for ever and ever. 

1 Acts XV. 21. 

9 



130 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

' Let us kneel,' they said, ' before the Lord our Maker, for He is 
the Lord our God.' And therefore, let them have gained it how 
they may, they had an indomitable hope, or rather, confidence, 
which all unpropitiousness of outer appearances had only served to 
stimulate, that He would bring them through, that He had a 
purpose for them, and that He would bring it to pass : that the 
world was no mechanical system of meaningless vicissitudes, but 
an order, of which indeed they little realized the scope, moving 
under the hand of a Ruler for a purpose of glory and beneficence. 
That the confidence of the extraordinary destiny which under this 
order was reserved for Israel, as well as the present possession of 
the Divine law and covenant, should have produced an intense 
sense of unity and fellowship, was a matter of course. The Roman 
is obliged to recognize their mutual charity, however deformed, as 
he thinks, by their antipathy to all who were not of their kindred 
and faith. 

But such an answer to our question, though it brings before us 
a sign, and a sign of the very highest, that is of the moral and 
spiritual, order, does not perhaps set us at the point from which 
the whole meaning of the position opens to us most naturally. It 
may do this more effectually to ask whether there was any material 
in Judaism for a world-religion, and for that world-religion which 
grew out of it ? 

Perhaps if we performed the futile task of trying to imagine a 
world-religion, we should, with some generality of consent, define 
as its essentials three or four points which it is striking to find 
were fundamentals of the religion of Israel, and at that time of no 
other. We should require a doctrine of God, lofty, spiritual, 
moral : a doctrine of man which should affirm and secure his 
spiritual being and his immortality : and a doctrine of the relations 
between God and man, which should give reality to prayer and to 
the belief in providence, and root man's sense of responsibility in 
the fact of his obligation to a righteousness outside and above 
himself, a doctrine in short of judgment. It needs no words to 
show how the religion of Israel in its full development not only 
taught these truths, but gave them the dignity and importance 
which belong to the corner-stones of a religion. 

But then along with these that religion taught other beliefs as 
clearly conceived, which seemed to be of the most opposite char- 
acter : just as distinctive and exclusive as the former were univer- 
sal. It taught the obligation in every detail of a very stringent 
written law, and of a ceremonial and sacrificial system, centred at 
Jerusalem, and forming the recognized communication between 



iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 1 3 1 

God and man. It taught a special election of Israel and covenant 
of God with Israel, a special purpose and future for Israel. Nor 
was the conception of the participation by other nations in the 
blessings of Messiah's rule (to which we, reading for example the 
prophecies of Isaiah in the light of the sequel, cannot but give a 
dominant place), more to an Israelite than a striking incident in 
a distinctively Israelite glory. 

It would seem then, combining these two sides, that there was 
in Israel the foundation on which a religion for the world could 
be laid, but that it could only be made available under stringent 
and, as it might appear, impossible conditions. An attempt to 
make a religion by extracting the universal truths in Judaism 
would have been simply to desert at once the vantage-ground 
which it was proposed to occupy, because it would have conflicted 
directly with every Jewish instinct, belief, tradition, and hope. It 
the thing was to be done, it must be done by some power and 
teaching which, while extricating into clearness all that was truest 
in the theology and morality of Israel, was also able to show to 
the judgment of plain men and earnest seekers that it constituted 
a true climax of Israel's history, a true fulfilment of the promises 
and prophecies which Jews had now made matters of notoriety 
everywhere, a true final cause of all the peculiar and distinctive 
system of Israel. It must be able to take Israel to witness, and 
therefore it must be able to convince men not only that it had a 
high theology and a refined morality, but that God had ' visited 
His people : ' and that ' what He had spoken unto the fathers He 
had so fulfilled.' It must produce accordingly not only doctrine, 
but fact. It must carry on, what was implied in the whole dis- 
cipline of Israel, the assertion that truth was not a matter of 
speculation, but a word from God ; or the knowledge of a dealing 
of God with man clothing itself with reality, embodying itself in 
fact, making a home for itself in history. It is true that the 
Judaism of the synagogue in its idolatry of the law, had assumed 
the appearance of a paper system, but in that form it had no 
promise or power of expansion : and on the side where the reli- 
gion of Israel admitted of development into some higher and wider 
state, it was distinctly a religion not of theory or teaching only, 
but of Divine action revealing itself in history. 

It will not escape any observer of the beginnings of Christianity 
that it was precisely this attempt which the Gospel of Jesus made. 
If we watch St. Paul speaking to his Gentile audiences at Lystra 
or Athens, he brings to bear upon the instincts of his hearers 
the strong magnet of a clear and definite Theism. But these 



132 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

addresses themselves implicitly contain another element ; and we 
must now look to them for examples of the process, the careful 
earnest process, by which the Gospel did its rapid and yet most 
gradual work of conversion. Unquestionably, as St. Paul himself 
affirms, and as the Acts and the early apologetic writers show us, 
it was done by asserting and making good the assertion with care- 
ful proof and reasoning, that in the historical appearance and char- 
acter of Jesus Christ, in his treatment while on earth, in Hie 
resurrection and heavenly exaltation, was to be found the true, 
natural, and legitimate fulfilment of that to which the Scriptures 
in various ways, direct and indirect, pointed, and of that which 
the hope of Israel, slowly fashioned by the Scriptures under the 
discipline of experience, had learned to expect. This could be 
pressed home most directly on Jews, but it was available also for 
the large prepared class among Gentiles, to whom the pre-exis- 
tence of these prophecies and anticipations was known as a matter 
of fact, and to some of whom the Jewish Scriptures had been a per- 
sonal discipline ; the truth of the Gospel was one ' now made 
manifest and by the Scriptures of the prophets, according to the 
commandment of the everlasting God, made known to all nations 
for the obedience of faith.' The double requirement was fulfilled, 
and a religion, intrinsically universal and eternal, was seen by spirit- 
ually clear-sighted eyes to be in a most real and organic sense the 
flower of Israel's stalk. 

(3) If it has appeared that in the placing of the nation at the 
era, and in its character and belief, there was something much to 
be ' w r ondered at,' and, more definitely, something marvellously 
suited, not indeed to generate such a religion as that of the Gos- 
pel, but to foster and assist its growth when the seed of Divine 
fact should be sown on the prepared soil ; then we shall ask, 
finally, whether there is anything of like striking significance in the 
way in which this state of things had come about? Let us pass by 
the causes by which the people of Israel obtained their external 
position. These, even including a thing so remarkable as the spon- 
taneous restoration by an Oriental Empire of a deported people, 
are not in themselves different from the ordinary workings of his- 
tory ; though in combination they may contribute to deepen the 
impression of a hand fashioning out of many elements, and in 
many ways, a single great result. But how had the Jews come to 
be what they were? how had they gained the religious treasure 
which they possessed, and the tenacity of religious and national 
life which played guardian to it? The whole course of Israel's 
history must, in one sense, give the answer to this question : and 



iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 133 

there are no controversies more difficult or more unsolved than 
those which are now raging round the problem of that course, its 
origin, stages, and order. But it may be possible to make some 
reflections on it without entangling ourselves very much in those 
controversies. 

(a) At the outset it is impossible not to be struck by the inter- 
est which the Jews themselves felt in the process of their history. 
That interest belongs to the very centre of their life and thought. 
It is not an offshoot of national vainglory, for (as has been so 
often remarked) it resulted in a record full-charged with the inci- 
dents of national failure and defection : it is not the result of a 
self conscious people analyzing its own moral and other develop- 
ment, for though the moral judgment is indeed always at work in 
the narratives and the poems, it is more occupied in drawing out 
the teaching of recurring sequences of sin and punishment than in 
framing a picture of the whole. The result is to lay a picture of 
development before us, but the aim is to treasure and record every 
detail of God's dealings with the nation of His choice. This is 
what gives continuity and unity to the whole ; this is what lends 
to it its intense and characteristic uniqueness. And when we look 
steadily at this, we perceive afresh, what familiarity almost con- 
ceals from us, the distinctive quality of Israel's religion ; that it is 
not a system of teaching, nor a tradition of worship, nor a personal 
discipline, though it may include all these ; but that it is in itself 
a belief in the working of God, Who is the God of all the earth, 
but specially the God of Israel, and Who works indeed every- 
where, but in an altogether special sense in Israel. In reflecting 
on their history they contemplate the object of their faith. Hence 
truth is to them not a philosophic acquisition, but lies in the words 
which had come from God faithfully treasured and received : it 
is revealed in word and act : goodness, in man or nation, is the 
faithful adherence to those conditions, under which the good pur- 
pose of God can work itself out and take effect : it is a corres- 
pondence to a purpose of grace : and the centre and depositary of 
their hope is neither the human race, nor any association for moral 
and religious effort, but an organism raised by Him who raises all 
the organisms of nature from a chosen seed, and drawn onwards 
through the stages by which family passes into nation and king- 
dom, and then through that higher discipline by which the natural 
commonwealth changes into the spiritual community of the faithful 
' remnant.' If any one will try to realize the impression which 
Christianity made upon the heathen world, he will not fail to see 
how the new truth was able to impress men because it found these 



134 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

conceptions of revelation, grace, and an organic society of God's 
choice and shaping, all so strange and so impressive to the heathen 
world, ingrained as the natural elements of religion in the men 
whom it made its instruments. 

But why did the Jews so regard their history? For the answer 
w~ may revert to the other question, What made them what they 
were at the Christian era? For they had gone through a crisis 
calculated to destroy both their existence and their religion. It 
has been in fashion with some writers to emphasize the resem- 
blances, and minimize the differences, between the religion of 
Israel and that of its neighbors. In view of this it becomes 
important to note the specific peril of ancient religions. That 
peril was that the close association of the nation with its god 
caused the failure of the one to appear a failure of the other, and 
to endanger or destroy the respect paid to him. The religion of 
a subdued or ruined people was, as we may say, a demonstrated 
failure. Sennacherib's defiance of Hezekiah urges this with a 
conqueror's irony. 1 The case of the Ten Tribes had probably 
given an illustration of it within the circle of Israel itself. And in 
Judah, upon any showing, there was enough of the feeling that 
Jehovah was responsible for His people, of the conviction that He 
would certainly protect His own, of the confidence resting on 
prosperity and liable to be shaken by its loss, to make the downfall 
of the state, carrying with it that of the Temple and the outer 
order of religion, an enormous peril to the religion itself, and with 
it to the very existence of Israel. It is not difficult to discern the 
agency by which the peril was averted. That agency was Prophecy. 
Modern criticism, though it may quarrel with the inspiration or 
predictive power of the prophets, has given fresh and unbiassed 
witness to their importance as an historic phenomenon. Kuenen, 2 
for example, points out how at every turning-point in Israel's later 
history there stands a man who claims to bring a word of God to 
the people. Prof. Huxley, 3 in a recent article, has told us that ' a 
vigorous minority of Babylonian Jews,' that is, the Jews upon 
whom the full forces of prophecy bore, ' created the first con- 
sistent, remorseless, naked Monotheism, which, so far as history 
records, appeared in the world . . . and they inseparably united 
therewith an ethical code, which, for its purity and its efficiency as 
a bond of social life, was, and is, unsurpassed.' Of whatever fact 
may underlie this description, the prophets are at once evidence 
and authors. 

1 Isaiah xxxvi. 18. 2 Hibbert Lectures, 1882, p. 231. 

3 Nineteenth Century, April, 18S6. 



iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 135 

Now prophecy confronted the impending peril in the name of 
Jehovah ; on the one side it displayed the enemy (whether as by 
Isaiah it prescribed a bound to his advance, or as by Jeremiah 
announced the catastrophe to be wrought by him) as himself 
utterly in Jehovah's hands, His axe or saw for discipline upon the 
trees of the forest ; on the other side it showed that Jehovah's 
obligation to Israel was conditioned by His essential righteousness ; 
that national disaster might be Jehovah's necessary vengeance, and 
that His purpose for Israel — which it reasserted with fullest 
emphasis — might need to be realized for an Israel purified by 
such discipline, a shoot from the stock of the felled tree, the 
remnant of an ' afflicted and poor people.' l And prophecy was 
beforehand with all this ; it was not an afterthought to explain 
away a calamity ; and so it fashioned in Israel at least a core of 
spiritual faith, to which outward disaster of polity and religion, 
however destructive, was not confounding, and which had stamina 
enough in it to draw wholesome though bitter nourishment from 
the hard Captivity discipline. This, when the flood came, was an 
ark for Israel's religion, and, in its religion, for the national life, 
which re-organized itself under new conditions round the nucleus 
of the religion. 

Thus, at the crisis and hinge of the historical development 
which issued in the wonderfully placed and constituted Israel of 
Christ's time, and which was crowned by the New Religion, we 
find this agency, which in itself would arrest our wonder. The 
more we look at it, the more wonderful it is. Every suggestion of 
comparison with heathen oracles, divination and the rest, can only 
bring out with more vivid effect the contrast and difference between 
it and all such things. It claims by the mouth of men transpar- 
ently earnest and honest, to speak from God. It brings with it 
the highest credentials, moral, spiritual, historical : moral, for it 
spends what at first sight seems all its strength in the intrepid and 
scathing rebuke of the evils immediately round it, especially in the 
high places of society, against the lust, cruelty, avarice, frivolity, 
insolence, foul worships, which it found so rankly abundant ; 
spiritual, for it speaks the language of an absolutely unworldly 
faith, and accomplishes a great spiritual work, such as we can 
hardly over-estimate, unless indeed with Prof. Huxley we distort 
its proportions so as to prejudice the earlier religion from which it 
sprang or the Christianity to which it contributed : historical, 
because occurring at the very crisis of Israel's history (750-550), 

1 Isaiah x. 15 ; xi. 1 ; Zeph. iii. 12. 



136 The Religion 6f the Incarnation. 

it gained credence and authority from the witness of events, and 
dealt with an emergency of the most perilous and bewildering 
kind, as not the most skilful opportunist could have dealt with it, 
by a use, as sublime as simple, of the principles of righteousness 
and faith. If we compare what the prophets did for their con- 
temporaries and what they did for the future of Israel and the 
world, and see that this was done, not by two sets of utterances 
working two different ways, but by a single blended strain of 
prophecy, we gain a double impression, of which the twofold force 
is astonishing indeed. It is gained without pressing their claim to 
predictive power, at least beyond the horizons of their own period. 
But it is impossible for any careful and candid reader of the words 
of the prophets to stop there, and not to feel that there is another 
element in them, not contained in a passage here and there but 
forever reappearing, interwoven with the rest, and evidently felt 
by the prophets themselves to be in some sense necessary for the 
vindication and completion of their whole teaching. It is an 
element of anticipation and foresight. We see that this is so, and 
we see in part the method of it. It is bound up with, it springs 
out of all that is spiritually and morally greatest in the prophets. 
Their marvellous, clear-sighted, steady certainty that the Lord who 
sitteth above rules all, that He is holy, and that unrighteousness in 
man or nations cannot prevail ; their insight piercing through the 
surface of history to underlying laws of providential order ; the 
strange conviction or consciousness, felt throughout the nation but 
centring in the prophets, that this God had a purpose for Israel ; — 
these deep things, which, however they came and whatever we 
think of them, make Israel's distinctive and peculiar glory, were 
accompanied by, and issued in, anticipations of a future which 
would vindicate and respond to them. Just as the belief in a 
future life for God's children was not taught as a set doctrine to 
the Jews, but grew with the growth of their knowledge of the 
Living and Holy God, and of man's relation as a spiritual being to 
Him, so with the predictions of which we speak. As it was given 
to the prophets to realize the great spiritual truths of present 
because eternal moment which they taught, it was given to them 
also to discern that these truths pointed to a future which should 
bring them vindication. The cloudy time of trial and confusion 
would one day come to a close ; the Sun whose rays they caught 
would one day shine out ; the partial and passing deliverances in 
which they taught men to see God's hand must one day issue in 
a deliverance of deeper moment, of lasting and adequate signifi- 
cance ; there would be an unbaring of God's arm, a manifesting of 



iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 137 

His power to decide, to justify, to condemn, and it would be seen 
in some final form why and how Israel was, in a distinctive sense, 
the people of the God of the whole earth ; that union between 
God and His people, of which the prophets were themselves medi- 
ators and which was so miserably imperfect and so constantly 
broken, would one day be complete ; and, finally, even the very 
instruments which He was using in the present, the Anointed 
King, the chosen Royal House, the Prophet-Servant of God, the 
holy hill of Zion, were charged with a meaning of which the 
significance was only in the future to become clear. Thus in this 
free, deep, spiritual — let us say it out, inspired — manner the 
predictions of prophecy emerge and gather shape. Thus among 
the people which was most conservative and jealous of its own 
religious privilege, the promise most deeply cherished was one in 
which all nations of the earth should be blessed, and there is heard 
the strange announcement of a 'new covenant.' Thus it comes 
about that the most satisfying and satisfied of all religions becomes 
the one which, in its deepest meaning, in the minds of its most 
faithful followers, strains forward most completely beyond itself. 
Thus, as it has been said, ' Prophecy takes off its crown and lays 
it at the feet of One who is to be.' Thus a people who have 
become intensely and inexorably monotheistic and to whom the 
Deity becomes more and more remote in awful majesty so that 
they do not dare to name His Name, carry down with them 
Scriptures which discover the strange vision of a human King 
with Divine attributes and strain towards some manifestation of 
God in present nearness. Thus amidst the pictures in which, with 
every varying detail, using the scenery, the personages, the nations, 
the ideas of its own day, the instinct of prophetic anticipation 
finds expression, there emerges, with gradually gathering strength, 
a definite Hope, and some clear lineaments of that which is to be. 

For, be it observed, at this point interpretation, declaring what 
the prophets seem to us to-day to mean, passes into and gives 
way to historical fact. The most sceptical cannot deny either that 
the words in which the prophets spoke of the future did, as a mat- 
ter of fact, crystallize into a hope, — a hope such as has no parallel 
in history, and of which distorted rumors were able to stir and 
interest the heathen world ; or that they were, long before the 
time of Jesus, interpreted as sketching features, some general and 
shadowy, some curiously distinct and particular, of Messiah's work 
and kingdom. 

And then, face to face with this, stands another fact as confess- 
edly historical. For, ' in the fulness of the time,' it did appear to 



138 The Religioii of the Incarnation. 

men of many kinds who had the books in their hands, — men with 
every reason for judging seriously and critically, and in most cases 
with the strongest prejudice in favor of an adverse judgment, — 
that these prophecies were fulfilled in a King and a Kingdom such 
as they never dreamt of till they saw them. It would be a strange 
chapter in the history of delusion if there were no more to add. 
But there is to add, first, that the King and the Kingdom whereto 
(in no small part upon the seeming perilous ground of this cor- 
respondence with prophecy) these men gave their faith, have 
proved to win such a spiritual empire as they claimed ; and, fur- 
ther, that men like ourselves, judging at the cool distance of two 
thousand years, are unable to deny that in the truest sense of ' ful- 
filment/ as it would be judged by a religious mind, Jesus and His 
Kingdom do i fulfil the prophets,' — fulfil their assertion of a 
unique religious destiny for Israel by which the nations were to 
profit, of a time when the righteousness of God should be revealed 
for the discomfiture of pride and sin and for the help of the meek, 
of a nearer dwelling of God with His people, of a new covenant, 
and of the lasting reign of a perfect Ruler. 

To some minds it may weaken, but to others it will certainly 
intensify, the impression thus created, if they are asked to observe 
that now and again there occur in the Jewish Scriptures words, 
passages, events, in which with startling distinctness, independence, 
and minuteness there stand forth features of what was to be. It is 
as if the anticipation which fills the air with glow focussed itself 
here and there in sparkling points of light which form and flash 
and fade away again. We may confidently assert that in the case 
of such passages as the 2 2d and 110th Psalms, or the 9th and 
53d chapters of Isaiah, the harder task is for him who will deny 
than for him who will assert a direct correspondence between 
prediction and fulfilment. If they stood alone, general scientific 
considerations might make it necessary to undertake the harder 
task. Standing out as they do from such a context and back- 
ground as has been here indicated, the interpretation which sees 
in them the work of a Divine providence shaping out a ' sign ' for 
the purpose which in each Christian age, and especially in the first, 
it has actually subserved, is the interpretation which is truest to all 
the facts. They are the special self-betrayal of a power which is 
at work throughout, of which the spiritual ear hears the sound, 
though we are often unable distinctly to see the footprints. 

It seems then impossible, upon such a view of the phenomena 
of prophecy as has been here roughly and insufficiently indicated, 
to deny that whatever appearance of preparation we may dis- 



iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 139 

cern in the condition, outward and inward, of the Jews in the 
time of Christ, is strongly corroborated by a like appearance of 
preparation in the process by which they had become what they 
were. 

{b) We have selected out of all the foregoing history the epoch 
and the influence of the prophets for several reasons. They pre- 
side over the most critical period of Israel's history. They seem 
to bring to most pronounced expression the spirit and character 
which pervades the whole of that history. They are known to us 
through their own writings ; and we are therefore on ground where 
(comparatively speaking) the premises are uncontroverted. And 
as it is the fashion, perhaps, to discredit the argument of prophecy, 
— partly, no doubt, on account of the technical form in which 
it was ordinarily presented, — it is important to reassert that in all 
its main strength that argument holds its ground, reinforced, 
indeed, as we think, by the increased power to apprehend its 
breadth and solidity which our more historically trained modern 
minds should have gained. But selection of what is most salient 
should imply no neglect of the rest ; and the argument, or view of 
the facts, — which has here for clearness sake been abbreviated, 
and mainly centralized upon the work and implications of proph- 
ecy, — can be deepened as the drift of the great lines of Israel's 
discipline is more deeply realized. Thus, for example, little or 
nothing has been here said of the Law. Yet, without foreclosing 
any discussion as to its sources and development, we can see that 
the law of God was a factor in every stage of Israel's history, and 
that in the making of the prepared Israel of Christ's time the law 
in its fullest and most developed shape was, and had been for ages, 
a paramount influence. No influence more concentrated and 
potent can be found in history. And to see the deepest drift of 
it we have no need to speculate on what might have been, or was 
sure to be. Historical documents point us to what was. The 
Epistles to the Romans and the Galatians, and the Epistle to the 
Hebrews, lay open respectively two ways of its working. On 
the one side it appears as a great witness for righteousness. Men 
were schooled to live under a sense of peremptory obligation ; to 
comply scrupulously, exactly, submissively with an unquestioned 
authority. This sense and temper is liable to great abuse : it 
lends itself when abused to a mechanical morality, to a morbid 
casuistry, to the complacency of an external perfectness. It was 
so abused very widely among the Jews. But it is nevertheless an 
indispensable factor in a true morality, to which it lends the spe- 
cial power of command ; and in Israel it conferred this power 



140 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

because it connected obligation with the will of a righteous God. 
This is expressed in the repeated sanction, ' I am the Lord your 
God,' following precept after precept of the law; and in the sum- 
mary claim, ' Be ye holy, for I am holy.' Evidently here there is 
that which transcends all mechanical schemes of obedience ; there 
is an infinite standard. As such it pointed and impelled onwards 
towards the true religion in which faith and holiness should be 
entirely at one. As such meanwhile it stimulated and dismayed 
the deeper spirits; stimulating them by the loftiness of its demand, 
dismaying them by the proved impossibility of that perfect com- 
pliance which alone was compliance at all. Thus the foundations 
were laid of a temper at once robust and humble, confident and 
diffident ; though they were laid upon a contradiction which the 
law had in itself no power to resolve. There was indeed (here 
we take up the guidance of the Epistle to the Hebrews) one part 
of the law which acknowledged that contradiction, which half 
promised to resolve it, but having no real power to do so, could 
only shape and deepen the demand for some solution. This was, 
of course, the sacrificial system. The sacrificial system opens up 
quite other thoughts from those of strict demand and strict obedi- 
ence. It points to quite another side of religious and moral 
development. Yet it starts from the same truth of a Holy God 
Who requires, and inasmuch as He is holy must require, a per- 
fect obedience. Only it acknowledges the inevitable fact of dis- 
obedience. It embodies the sense of need. It appeals to, and as 
part of the Divine law it reveals, a quality in the Supreme Good- 
ness which can go beyond commanding and condemning, to 
forgive and reconcile. It creates in a word the spirit of humility, 
and it feels, at the least, after a God of love. 

What a profound preparation there is in this for the life which 
Christ blessed in the Beatitudes and inaugurated by all that He 
was and did, and for the truth of the Divine being and character 
which was set forth in Him. Yet the law only prepared for this, 
and made the demand which this met. It made no answer to 
its own demand. It could not reconcile its own severity and its 
own hopes of mercy ; its apparatus of sacrifice was in itself abso- 
lutely and obviously insufficient for any solution of the contradic- 
tion. It was a marvellous discipline which, while it trained its 
people so far, demanded the more urgently something which all 
its training could never give nor reach. 

(c) The work of prophecy and the work of the law was also 
(if we can distinguish causes which were so much affected by one 
another) the work of history. To the work of the prophets, 



IV. Preparation in History for Christ. 141 

indeed, the history of both the past and the succeeding times was 
essential, — the former to supply their work with a standing ground, 
the latter to engrain its teaching into the life of the nation. We 
look back, and we ask, What gave the prophets their advantage, 
what was the fulcrum of their lever ? Trained to observe the pro- 
cesses of religious evolution, we must refuse to believe with Pro- 
fessor Huxley that a lofty monotheism and a noble morality sprang 
out of the ground among a ' minority of Babylonian Jews.' But 
we shall be prepared to find that the rudimentary stages differ 
much from the mature. The beginnings of life, as we know them, 
are laid in darkness ; they emerge crude and childish ; the physi- 
cal and outward almost conceals the germ of spiritual and rational 
being which nevertheless is the self, and which will increasingly 
assert itself and rule. It may be so with that organism which God 
was to make the shrine of His Incarnation. We may have to 
learn that the beginnings of Israel are more obscure, more elemen- 
tary, less distinctive from surrounding religions, than we had sup- 
posed. We need not fear to be as bold as Amos in recognizing 
that what was in one aspect the unique calling of God's Son out of 
Egypt, 1 was in another but one among the Divinely ruled processes 
of history, such as brought up the Philistines from Caphtor and 
the Syrians from Kir. 2 We need not be more afraid than Ezekiel 
to say that the peculiar people were an offshoot (if so it should be) 
of natural stocks, with the Amorite for father and the Hittite for 
mother. 3 But all this will hardly take from us that sense of con- 
tinuous shaping of a thing towards a Divine event which has 
always been among the supports of faith. We shall see that the 
prophetic appeals imply a past, and that their whole force lies in 
what they assume, and only recall to their hearers ; the special 
possession of Israel by Jehovah, His selection of them for His 
own, His deliverances of them from Egypt and onwards, giving 
the earnest of a future purpose for which they were preserved, and 
for which His definite promises were committed to them, to the 
seed of Abraham, the house of Israel, the line of David. These 
things the prophets imply, standing upon these they speak with 
all the force of those who need only bid the people to realize and 
to remember, or at most to receive from God some fresh confirma- 
tion and enlargement of their hopes. 4 

1 Hosea xi. 1. 2 Amos ix. 7. 3 Ezekiel xvi. 3. 

* It is interesting to note that, according to the record preserved by 

Israel of their own history, that which Kuenen says of later times, that ' at 

each turning-point of the history stands a man who claims to bring a word 

from God,' is exactly true of the older history too : Abraham, Moses, 



M 2 The Religion of the Incarnation, 

Or again, from the work of the prophets we look forward, and 
when we have recovered from our surprise at seeing that a dreary 
interval of five centuries separates the Evangelical prophecy, which 
seemed so ready for the flower of the Gospel, from the time of its 
blooming, we discern how the processes of that interval were util- 
ized in realizing, engraining, diffusing the great truths of prophetic 
teaching. The return without a monarchy and under an ecclesias- 
tical governor, and the dispersion through many lands, necessitated 
in act that transformation of the political into the spiritual polity, 
almost of the nation into the Church, of which Isaiah's work was 
the germ. The institution of the synagogues, which belongs to 
this time and in which public, worship was detached from all local 
associations and from the ancient forms of material sacrifice, was, 
as it were, the spiritual organ of the new ubiquitous cosmopolitan 
Jewish life. Yet contemporaneously the centralizing influences 
gained strength. The conservative work of Ezra and of the Scribes 
and Rabbis at whose head he stands, gathered up and preserved 
the treasures which gave a consciously spiritual character to Israel's 
national loyalty ; and guarded with the hedge of a scrupulous literal- 
ism, what needed some such defence to secure it against the perils 
implied in being carried wide over the world. By the resistance in 
Palestine under Syrian rule to Hellenizing insolence, and in the Dis- 
persion to the fascinations and pleasures of Hellenizing culture, and 
by the great Maccabean struggle, the nation was identified with re- 
ligious earnestness and zeal in a way of which we only see the cari- 
cature and distortion in the Pharisaism which our Lord denounced. 

Thus, if we compare our Lord's time with the great age of 
prophecy, we see how much has been acquired. Time has been 
given for the prophetic influences to work. There has been loss, 
but there has also been gain. That conscious, explicit, and mag- 
nificently uncompromising Monotheism, which, in the mouth of 
the Evangelical prophet was quivering with the glow and passion of 
freshly inspired realization, has, by ' the end of the age ' had time 
to bring everything in the sphere of religion under its influence. 
It had discovered its points of contact with the highest aspirations 
of the Greek thought which on intellectual lines felt its way towards 
God. And it had unfolded its own corollaries : it had drawn 

Samuel, David, are all in this sense prophets. Yet there is no appear- 
ance of a later age forming a past in its own likeness. The prophets 
do not imagine an earlier row of prophets like themselves, put in like the 
portraits of the early Scottish kings at Holyrood, to fill the blanks of history. 
The early figures are not cut to prophetic pattern; they have each their dis- 
tinct individuality of character and office, only they have a unity of Divine 
commission and service. 



iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 143 

along with it the great spiritual truths which cohere with the belief 
in one Living and True God : and Israel in the Pharisee epoch had 
passed, we hardly know how, into secure, if not undisputed, posses- 
sion of the belief in a future life, in a world of spirits, and in the 
spiritual character of prayer. 

But there was another and more direct manner, in which the 
work of history interlaced with what we have indicated as the work 
of the law. In the formation of the temper of chastened confidence 
which is so characteristic of later Israel, a part must evidently be 
given to the discipline of national experience saddened by departed 
glory, and with the shadows thickening over it. Just as we can 
see that the populations of the Empire were in a sense more ready 
to learn of Christ than the young self-reliant Greeks of Sparta or 
Athens could have been, so we can see in such language as that of 
the 119th Psalm or of the 9th chapter of Daniel a temper to which 
the meek and lowly Christ would make an appeal which might 
have been lost upon the rough times of the judges or the prosper- 
ous age of the monarchy. Old age has come, and with it the wis- 
dom of a chastened spirit. This is not difficult to see, and it is 
important to take it into account. It means that the comparatively 
normal discipline of life has brought with it (as doubtless it is 
meant to do alike in personal and national life) a spiritual gain. 
But it is important to see how much of the process and the effect 
remains unexplained. The chastening is obvious, but whence the 
confidence ? 

It is in some far less normal cause, in something which seems dis- 
tinctive of Israel, that we have to find the adequate explanation of 
the whole result. We have to ask (as Pascal so keenly felt x ) why a 
nation records its failures and misfortunes as being chastisements 
of wilful, repeated, and disgraceful fault, and then jealously guards 
the record as its most cherished possession. It would be easy to 
suggest that there is in this an egotism clothing itself in humility : 
and to pbint out that this egotism would explain the confidence 
which still looked forward to the future, which anticipated great- 
ness for an ' afflicted and poor people,' and a blessing to all the 
nations of the earth from its own history. Only this is just to slur 
the difficulty, and under the invidious word ' egotism ' to disguise 
that wonderful instinct of a destiny and a mission which is so 
strangely unlike egotism, and which allowed, or even produced, in 
so profound a form the self-condemnation which egotism refuses. 

Doubtless the effects of these preparing forces were felt, and 

1 Pensdes, ii. 7, § 2. 



144 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

their meanings discerned, only by a few. Not only were they ' not 
all Israel that were of Israel/ but the bulk of the nation and its 
representative and official leaders were blind. They were off the 
way, down the false tracks of literalist Rabbinism, or of one-sided 
Essene asceticism, or of earthly visions of a restored kingdom, or 
(as in Alexandria ) of a philosophized Judaism. The issues were 
the crucifixion of the Lord, and ail which Judaism, without and 
within the Church, did to extinguish the Gospel and persecute its 
followers in its first age. It is right to refer to this, but there 
are probably few to whom it would cause any difficulty. To the 
observer of the world's history it is a common sight that the true 
issues and the distinctive work of a people is worked out not 
by the many, or by the prominent, but by the few, and often 
the obscure. To the student of Jewish history that which has 
made Israel what it is in world-significance appears throughout 
the course of its history as a gold thread running through a 
web of very different texture. It can be no surprise that the 
end should be of a piece with the rest. There, in a climax of sharp- 
est contrast, we see the antithesis which marks the history through- 
out. The training issues in a St. Mary, a Simeon, in those who 
1 waited for the consolation of Israel ' on the one side, and in the 
' Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.' on the other. The natural 
issue of Israel's life and tendencies is seen in the cold and sterile 
impotence which, because it is the ' corruption of the best,' is the 
most irreversible spiritual ruin ; while beside and amidst this there 
was fashioned by a grace and power above nature, though in a 
perfectly natural way, the true Israel which realize all that ' Israel 
according to the flesh ' professed yet betrayed, guarded yet ob- 
scured. And if we have at all rightly discerned as a principle of 
Divine preparation that it should be negative as well as positive, 
and should demonstrate to the world before Christ was given, how 
little the world's own wisdom or effort could supply His place, we 
shall not wonder that time was thus given for Israel to try out as 
it were its second experiment, and to show that by its selfishness 
and arrogance, by its ' carnalness/ it could warp and distort its 
later spiritual constitution, even more than its former temporal one, 
out of all likeness of what God woul£ have it be. 'The last state 
of the man ' was i worse than the first. ' 1 

But the observation of these predominant currents and forms of 
Jewish life and thought and religion has this further value, that it 
shows the variety, the energy, and the unlikeness to one another 

1 St. Matt. xii. 45. It should be observed that the words were spoken of 
'this wicked generation.' 



iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 145 

of the tendencies present in Israel. They emphasize the fact that 
the history of Israel was in no sense working itself out towards the 
production by its own forces of the true religion which went 
forth from the midst of it. They remind us how intractable the 
problem of finding by human ingenuity the solution which could 
harmonize in one issue elements so powerful and so alien from each 
other ; which, with a perfect spiritual liberty could combine an 
assertion of the permanent value of the law ; which with no with- 
drawal from, and despair of the world could secure all that was 
sought by Essene purity and self-denial; which, itself utterly 
unworldly, could satisfy the idea of a restored monarchy and a 
glory for Israel ; which while bringing no philosophy, could achieve 
what Jewish philosophizing had desired, in a capture of the world's 
reason by Jewish truth. 



III. In the last words we touch that with which this essay may 
perhaps fitly end. If its drift has been in any sense true, there 
stands before us, as perhaps the most striking feature of the whole 
situation, the co-existence of the tw r o preparations, the one gen- 
eral, indirect, contributory, and consisting only in an impressive 
convergence and centring of the lines of ordinary historical 
sequences ; the other special, directly introductory, and character- 
ized by the presence of a distinctive power, call it what we may, a 
genius for religion, or more truly and adequately a special grace of 
the Spirit of God, which is new and above ordinary experience, 
even as life is when it enters the rest of nature, and reason is when 
it appears in the world of life. The two preparations pursue their 
course unconscious of one another, almost exclusive of one another. 
Greek wisdom and Roman power have no dream of coming to 
receive from the narrow national cult of humbled and subject 
Israel. And Israel, even taught by the great prophets, could hard- 
ly find a place in her vision of the future for any destiny of the 
nations of the world. To this antagonism, or more strictly this 
ignoring of one another, there are exceptions, exceptions of the 
kind which emphasize the character of the situation which they 
hardly modify. Two streams of such force and volume as those 
of Jewish religion and classical life or culture could not touch and 
leave one altogether uninfluenced, though the influence was charac- 
teristically different. On the side of the world the spiritual needs 
of individuals caused numbers, not inconsiderable, to receive influ- 
ences which made them ready to act as seeding ground and ferment 

10 



146 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

for the Gospel. On the side of Israel, the strong sense of mission 
and of truth made the contact with Greek culture suggest the 
ambition to use it as a great instrument, to teach it to acknowledge 
and witness to the God of Israel, who was God of the whole earth ; 
and the results, in the Greek of the Septuagint and in the Helleno- 
Judaic writings of Alexandria and elsewhere, were invaluable in 
fashioning language and thought for Christ's service. But all the 
more distinctly, in the first case, does the antagonism, the gulf fixed, 
the mutual aversion, the impossibility, humanly speaking, of fusion 
between Jew and Gentile come out before our eyes. And in the 
second case the unreal romancings of the Sibylline works, the 
apparently isolated work of Philo, and the opportunism of a poli- 
tician like Josephus, have all the character of hybrids, and show no 
sign of the vital fusion by which out of a great wedlock a new 
thing comes to be. 

The two preparations stand apart : they go their own way. 
There is indeed in them a strange parallelism of common human 
experience and human need. Both have tried their experiments, 
made their ventures, won their successes, gone through their dis- 
ciplines of disenchantment and failure. Both are conscious of the 
dying of life : in Israel there is ' no prophet more ;' outside it 
philosophy has not the creativeness and energy of youth, but the 
quiet acquiescence and mild prudence of age, and life, public and 
private, is without adequate scope or aim. In both the ' tenden- 
cies towards ' a Gospel are as far as possible from making a ' ten- 
dency to produce ' one. In both there is the same desire for which 
the Jew alone can find conscious expression ; it is ' Quicken me ! ' 
Both need life. Both have no help in themselves. But in the 
lines which they follow and the hopes which they frame there 
is neither likeness nor compatibility. 'The Greeks seek after 
wisdom. 1 The intellect, and those who are distinctively men of 
the intellect, can hardly imagine human advance otherwise than in 
terms of the intellect. Philosophy conceives of it as a conquest 
of philosophical result, or even as an increase of philosophical ma- 
terial. It is the pain of an advanced and critical time, like that of 
which we speak, to feel this, and yet to feel that the experiments 
of speculation have gone far enough to show that by none of their 
alternative ways can there be any way out to the peace of certain 
truth. And yet it seems that without abdication of reason, there 
is no possibility of going any other way : the Greeks (and in this 
sense all the world was Greek) could only look for what they 
wanted in the form of a new philosophy. 

1 1 Cor. i. 22. 



iv. Preparation in History for Christ. 1 47 

But ' the Jews require a sign.' Totally different, but equally 
exclusive, were the conditions under which the Jew could conceive 
of a new epoch. The dread of exhausted resources did not haunt 
him, for he looked not to human capacity, but to Divine gift and 
interposition. But he thought that he knew the form in which 
such interposition would come ; it was not to be primarily a 
teaching (it is the Samaritan and not the Jew who is recorded as 
expecting in Messiah one who, ' when He is come, will tell us all 
things ' ] ) ; it must appear in action, ' with observation,' 2 with pomp 
and scenic display, with signs, and signs which, in a very visible and 
tangible sense, should seem to be from heaven, 3 in particular with 
circumstances of triumph and conquest, and with an exaltation of 
Israel to the glories of her monarchy many times enlarged. 

Such are the demands : the things sought and needed ; the con- 
ditions prescribed : definite, severally uncompromising, mutually 
unlike, and even conflicting. And then from out of Israel, without 
moral or political earthquake, without overwhelming display of 
supernatural force, nay even, to a superficial eye, with all the 
appearance of weakness and failure, without any rescue for Israel, 
with no attempt to present itself in philosophical form, with none 
of the strain and elaboration of a conscious effort to combine many 
in one, but rather with a paradoxical and offending ' simplicity ' and 
' foolishness ' of mere assertion, — there comes forth a Thing in 
which on the one side Jews — whom we all recognize to be the 
best Jews, Jews in the truest and deepest sense — find the whole 
spirit and meaning, even down to its detail, of the life and the hope 
of Israel summed up and fulfilled ; which left them no sense of dis- 
appointment, but rather a consciousness of having had hopes only 
too narrow and low ; which gave them the exulting sense of 
' reigning as kings,' with a ' King of Israel : ' while on the other side 
this same Thing was felt by ' Greeks ' as a ' wisdom ' flooding their 
reason with a light of truth and wisdom (sop hid), which met the 
search of philosophy {philo-sophia?) but also in simple and wise alike 
drew forth and ministered to needs which philosophy had but half 
seen and wholly failed to satisfy, enabling conscience to be candid 
and yet at peace, building up a new cosmopolitan fellowship, and 
restoring to human life dignity and value, not only in phrase and 

1 St. John iv. 25. 2 St. Luke xvii. 20. 

3 St. Matt. xii. 38 ; St. John vi. 30,-31, in each case following some of our 
Lord's own signs. 

4 This comes before us vividly in Justin Martyr's account of his own con- 
version. Dial. c. Tryph. 3 ff. 'Thus and for this reason I am a philoso- 
pher.' 



148 The Religion of the Incarnation* 

theory, but in truth. ' There came forth a Thing/ or rather there 
came forth One, in Whom all this was done. The question arises, 
'Whom say we that He is?' iVnd though the answer must be 
reached in different ways by different men, and the witness to Him 
in Whom is the sum of all, must needs be of many kinds ; yet the 
convergence of many lines (as we have been permitted to trace it) 
to One in Whom they are all combined and yet transcended, to One 
Whom they can usher in but were powerless to produce, may be no 
slight corroboration of the answer which was accepted, as we have 
to remember, by the lowly Jesus with significant solemnity : ' Thou 
art the Christ,' the Fulfiller of all high and inspired Jewish hope ; 
' the Son of the Living God,' * His Son, — as the Son of Man, in 
Whom all that is human reaches fulness ; and as the Son of God, 
Who brings down to man what he has been allowed to prove to 
himself that he cannot discover or create. 

1 St. Matt. xvi. 16. 



V. 

THE INCARNATION AND DEVELOPMENT. 



r 



J. R. ILLINGWORTH. 



V. 

THE INCARNATION AND DEVELOPMENT, 

I. The last few years have witnessed the gradual acceptance by 
Christian thinkers of the great scientific generalization of our age, 
which is briefly, if somewhat vaguely, described as the Theory of 
Evolution. History has repeated itself, and another of the ' oppo- 
sitions of science ' to theology has proved upon inquiry to be no 
opposition at all. Such oppositions and reconciliations are older 
than Christianity, and are part of what is often called the dialec- 
tical movement ; the movement, that is to say, by question and 
answer, out of which all progress comes. But the result of such 
a process is something more than the mere repetition of a twice- 
told tale. It is an advance in our theological thinking ; a definite 
increase of insight ; a fresh and fuller appreciation of those ' many 
ways ' in which ' God fulfils Himself.' For great scientific discov- 
eries, like the heliocentric astronomy, are not merely new facts to be 
assimilated ; they involve new ways of looking at things. And this 
has been pre-eminently the case with the law of evolution ; which, 
once observed, has rapidly extended to every department of 
thought and history, and altered our attitude towards all knowl- 
edge. Organisms, nations, languages, institutions, customs, creeds, 
have al^come to be regarded in the light of their development, and 
we feel that to understand what a thing really is, we must examine 
how it came to be. Evolution is in the air. It is the category of 
the age ; a ' partus temporis ;' a necessary consequence of our 
vvider field of comparison. We cannot place ourselves outside 
it, or limit the scope of its operation. And our religious opinions, 
like all things else that have come down on the current of develop- 
ment, must justify their existence by an appeal to the past. 

It is the object of the following pages to consider what popular 
misconceptions of the central doctrine of our religion, the Incar- 
nation, have been remedied ; what more or less forgotten aspects 
of it have been restored to their due place ; what new lights have 



15*2 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

been thrown upon the fulness of its meaning, in the course of our 
discussion of the various views of evolution. 

In face of the historical spirit of the age, the study of past theo- 
logy can never again be regarded as merely a piece of religious 
antiquarianism. And there are two classes of mind to which it 
should be of especial service. Many an earnest worker in the 
Christian cause, conscious how little the refinements of philosophy 
can influence for good or evil the majority of men, and generously 
impatient of all labor wasted, when the laborers are so few, is apt 
to underestimate what he considers the less practical departments 
of theology; forgetful that there are souls, and those among the 
noblest, to whom the primary avenue of access is the intellect; and 
who can only be led homeward by the illuminative way. The 
Christian of this type may be materially helped towards welcom- 
ing wider views, by being convinced that what he has been too 
easily apt to regard as metaphysical subtleties, or as dangerous 
innovations, or as questionable accommodations of the Gospel to 
the exigencies of passing controversy, are, after all, an integral part 
of the great Catholic tradition. On the other hand, many plau- 
sible attacks upon the Christian creed are due to the inadequate 
methods of its professed interpreters. Fragments of doctrine, 
torn from their context and deprived of their due proportions, are 
brandished in the eyes of men by well-meaning but ignorant apolo- 
gists as containing the sum total of the Christian faith, with the 
lamentable consequence that even earnest seekers after truth, and 
much more its unearnest and merely factious adversaries, mislead 
themselves and others into thinking Christianity discredited, when 
in reality they have all along been only criticising its caricature. 
Such men need reminding that Christianity is greater than its iso- 
lated interpreters or misinterpreted in any age ; that in the course 
of its long history it has accumulated answers to many an objection 
which they in their ignorance think new ; and that, in the confidence 
of its universal mission and the memory of its many victories, it 
still claims to be sympathetic, adequate, adaptable to the problems 
and perplexities of each successive age. 

The general tendency of thought since the Reformation has 
been in the direction of these partial presentations of Christianity. 
The Reformers, from various causes, were so occupied with what 
is now called Soteriology, or the scheme of salvation, that they 
paid but scant attention to the other aspects of the Gospel. And 
the consequence was that a whole side of the great Christian 
tradition, and one on which many of its greatest thinkers had 
lavished the labors of a lifetime, was allowed almost unconsciously 



v. The Incarnation and Development* 153 

to lapse into comparative oblivion ; and the religion of the Incar- 
nation was narrowed into the religion of the Atonement. Men's 
views of the faith dwindled and became subjective and self-regard- 
ing, while the gulf was daily widened between things sacred and 
things secular ; among which latter, art and science, and the whole 
political and social order, gradually came to be classed. 

Far otherwise was it with the great thinkers of the early Church ; 
and that not from an underestimate of the saving power of the 
Cross, which was bearing daily fruit around them, of penitence, 
and sanctity, and martyrdom, but from their regarding Christian 
salvation in its context. They realized that redemption was a 
means to an end, and that end the reconsecration of the whole 
universe to God. And so the very completeness of their grasp on 
the Atonement led them to dwell upon the cosmical significance 
of the Incarnation, its purpose to ' gather together all things in 
one.' For it was an age in which the problems of the universe 
were keenly felt. Philosophical thinking, if less mature, was not 
less exuberant than now, and had already a great past behind it. 
And the natural world, though its structural secrets were little 
understood, fascinated the imagination and strained the heart with 
its appealing beauty. Spiritualism, superstition, scepticism, were 
tried in turn, but could not satisfy. The questionings of the intel- 
lect still pressed for a solution. And the souls of Christians were 
stirred to proclaim that the new power which they felt within 
them, restoring, quickening, harmonizing the whole of their inner 
life, would also prove the key to all these mysteries of matter and 
of mind. 

So it was that the theology of the Incarnation was gradually 
drawn out, from the teaching of St. Paul and of St. John. The 
identity of Him Who was made man and dwelt among us, with 
Him by Whom all things were made and by Whom all things 
consist y His eternal pre-existence as the reason and the word of 
God, the Logos ; His indwelling presence in the universe as the 
source and condition of all its life, and in man as the light of his 
intellectual being; His Resurrection, His Ascension, — all these 
thoughts were woven into one magnificent picture, wherein crea- 
tion was viewed as the embodiment of the Divine ideas, and 
therefore the revelation of the Divine character; manifesting its 
Maker wi'h increasing clearness at each successive stage in the 
great scale of being, till in the fulness of time He Himself became 
man, and thereby lifted human nature, and with it the material 
universe to which man is so intimately linked ; and triumphing 
over the sin and death under which creation groaned and trav- 



154 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

ailed, opened by His Resurrection and then by His Ascension 
vistas of the glorious destiny purposed for His creatures before the 
world was. ' Factus est quod sumus nos, uti nos perficeret esse 
quod est ipse.' 1 

Such is the view of the Incarnation in what may be called its 
intellectual aspect, which we find gradually expressed with increas- 
ing clearness by the Fathers, from Justin to Athanasius. And 
with all its deep suggestiveness, it is still a severely simple picture, 
drawn in but few outlines, and those strictly scriptural. It was 
born of no abstract love of metaphysic, and stands in striking 
contrast to the wild speculations of the time. Its motive and its 
method were both intensely practical ; its motive being to present 
Christianity to the mind as well as to the heart ; and its method 
no more than to connect and interpret and explain the definite 
statements of St. Paul and St. John. Passing over the dark ages, 
when thought was in comparative abeyance, and the energies of 
the Church absorbed in the work of conversion and organization, 
we come, in the twelfth and following centuries, to a second 
period of intellectual ferment, less brilliant than that which char- 
acterized the decadence of the old civilization, but instinct with 
all the fire and restlessness of youth. Unsobered as yet by expe- 
rience, and unsupplied with adequate material from without, 
thought preyed upon itself and revelled in its new-found powers 
of speculation. Fragments of the various heresies which the 
Fathers had answered and outlived reappeared with all the halo of 
novelty around them. Religions were crudely compared and 
sceptical inferences drawn. Popular unbelief, checked in a meas- 
ure by authority, avenged itself by ridicule of all things sacred. 
It was a period of intense intellectual unrest, too many sided and 
inconsequent to be easily described. But as far as the anti-Chris- 
tian influences of the time can be summarized, they were mainly 
two, — the Arabic pantheism, and the materialism which was fos- 
tered in the medical schools : kindred errors, both concerned 
with an undue estimate of matter. And how did Christian the- 
ology meet them? Not by laying stress, like the later Deists, 
upon God's infinite distance from the world, but upon the close- 
ness of His intimacy with it ; by reviving, that is, with increased 
emphasis, the Patristic doctrine of the Incarnation, as the climax 
and the keystone of the whole visible creation. There is a greater 
divergence of opinion, perhaps, among the Schoolmen than 
among the Fathers ; and a far greater amount of that unprofitable 

1 Irenasus. 



v. The Incarnation and Development. 155 

subtlety for which they are apt to be somewhat too unintelligently 
ridiculed. But on the point before us, as on all others of primary 
importance, they are substantially unanimous, and never fail in 
dignity. 

' As the thought of the Divine mind is called the Word, Who is 
the Son, so the unfolding of that thought in external action {per 
opera exteriord) is named the word of the Word.' x 

' The whole world is a kind of bodily and visible Gospel of that 
Word by which it was created.' 2 

' Every creature is a theophany.' 3 

' Every creature is a Divine word, for it tells of God.' 4 

'The wisdom of God, when first it issued in creation, came not 
to us naked, but clothed in the apparel of created things. And 
then when the same wisdom would manifest Himself to us as the 
Son of God, He took upon Him a garment of flesh, and so was 
seen of men.' 5 

' The Incarnation is the exaltation of human nature and con- 
summation of the Universe.' 6 

Such quotations might be multiplied indefinitely from the pages 
of the Schoolmen and scholastic theologians. And the line of 
thought which they indicate seems to lead us by a natural sequence 
to view the Incarnation as being the predestined climax of crea- 
tion, independently of human sin. The thought is of course a 
mere speculation, 'beyond that which is written,' but from its first 
appearance in the twelfth century it has been regarded with 
increasing favor ; for it is full of rich suggestiveness, and seems 
to throw a deeper meaning into all our investigations of the world's 
gradual development. 

Again, from the relation of the Word to the universe follows 
His relation to the human mind. For ' that life was the light of 
men.' 

' The created intellect is the imparted likeness of God,' says 
St. Thomas ; and again, ' Every intellectual process has its origin 
in the Word of God Who is the Divine Reason.' ' The light of 
intellect is imprinted upon us by God Himself {immediate a 
Deo)? ' God continually works in the mind, as being both the 
cause and the guide of its natural light.' ' In every object of 
sensitive or rational experience God Himself lies hid.' 7 ' All 

1 St. Thorn. Aq., c. Gent., iv. 13. 

2 H. de Boseham (Migne), v. 190, p. 1353. 

3 Scot. Er. (Migne), v. 122, p. 302. * St. Bonav., In Eccles., ci. t. ix. 

5 H. de St. Victor (Migne), v. 177, p. 580. 

6 St. Thorn. Aquinas. 7 St. Bonav. de Reduct., sub fin. 



156 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

intelligences know God implicitly, in every object of their knowl- 
edge.' * ' Christ is our internal teacher, and no truth of any kind 
is known but through Him ; though He speaks not in language 
as we do, but by interior illumination.' 2 ' The philosophers have 
taught us the sciences, for God revealed them to them.' 3 

II. The point to be noticed in the teaching of which such pas- 
sages are scattered samples, is that the Schoolmen and orthodox 
mystics of the middle age, with Pantheism, materialism, rational- 
ism surging all around them, and perfectly conscious of the fact, 
met these errors, not by denying the reality of matter, or the capa- 
city of reason, as later apologists have often done, but by claiming 
for both a place in the Theology of the Word. And this Theology 
of the Word was, in reality, quite independent of, and unaffected 
by, the subtleties and fallacies and false opinions of the age, cob- 
webs of the unfurnished intellect which time has swept away. It 
was a magnificent framework, outside and above the limited knowl- 
edge of the day and the peculiarities of individual thinkers ; an 
inheritance from the Patristic tradition, which the Fathers, in their 
turn, had not invented, but received as Apostolic doctrine from 
Apostolic men, and only made more explicit by gradual definition, 
during centuries when, it has been fairly said, ; the highest reason, 
as independently exercised by the wise of the world, was entirely 
coincident with the highest reason as inspiring the Church.' 4 We 
have now to consider whether this view of the Incarnation, which, 
though in the countries most influenced by the Reformation it has 
dropped too much out of sight, has yet never really died out of the 
Church at large, is in any way incompatible with the results of mod- 
ern science ; or whether, on the contrary, it does not provide an 
outline to which science is slowly but surely giving reality and 
content. 

And at the outset we must bear in mind one truth which is now 
recognized on all sides as final, — viz., that the finite intellect can- 
not transcend the conditions of finitude, and cannot therefore reach 
or even conceive itself as reaching, an absolute, or, in Kantian 
phraseology, a speculative knowledge of the beginning of things. 
Whatever strides science may make in time to come towards 
decomposing atoms and forces into simpler and yet simpler ele- 
ments, those elements will still have issued from a secret laboratory 
into which science cannot enter, and the human mind will be as 
far as ever from knowing what they really are. Further, this initial 
limitation must of necessity qualify our knowledge in its every 

1 St. Thorn. Aq., de Verit., 22, 2, 1. 2 St. Bonav., Lum. Eccles. S. 12. 
3 Id., Lum. Eccles. S. 5. 4 Mark Pattison. 



v. The Incarnation and Development. T57 

stage. If we cannot know the secret of the elements in their sim- 
plicity, neither can we know the secret of their successive combina- 
tions. Before the beginning of our present system, and behind the 
whole course of its continuous development, there is a vast region 
of possibility, which lies wholly and forever beyond the power of 
science to affirm or to deny. It is in this region that Christian 
theology claims to have its roots, and of this region that it pro- 
fesses to give its adherents certitude, under conditions and by 
methods of its own. And of those conditions and methods it fear- 
lessly asserts that they are nowise inconsistent with any ascertained 
or ascertainable result of secular philosophy. 

As regards the origin of things, this is obvious. Science may 
resolve the complicated life of the material universe into a few ele- 
mentary forces, light, and heat, and electricity, and these perhaps 
into modifications of some still simpler energy ; but of the origin of 
energy (to irpwrov klvovv) it knows no more than did the Greeks of 
old. Theology asserts that in the beginning was the Word, and in 
Him was life, the life of all things created ; in other words, that 
He is the source of all that energy, whose persistent, irresistible 
versatility of action is forever at work moulding and clothing and 
peopling worlds. The two conceptions are complementary, and 
cannot contradict each other. 

But to pass from the origin to the development of things : the 
new way of looking at nature was thought at first both by its adhe- 
rents and opponents alike to be inimical to the doctrine of final 
causes. And here was a direct issue joined with Theology at once ; 
for the presence of final causes or design in the universe has not 
only been in all ages one of the strongest supports for natural 
religion, it is contained in the very notion of a rational creation, a 
creation by an Eternal Reason. And this was supposed to be 
directly negatived by the doctrine of the survival of the fittest 
through natural selection ; for if of a thousand forms, which came 
by chance into existence, the one which happened to correspond 
best with its environment survived, while the remainder disappeared, 
the adaptation of the survivor to its circumstances would have all 
the appearance of design, while in reality due to accident. If, 
therefore, this principle acted exclusively throughout the universe, 
the result would be a semblance of design without any of its reality, 
from which no theological inference could be drawn. But this 
consequence of natural selection obviously depends upon the 
exclusiveness of its action. If it is only one factor among many in 
the world's development, while there are instances of adaptation 
in nature, and those the more numerous, for which it fails to account, 



158 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

what has been called its dysteleological significance is at an end. 
Now its own author soon saw and admitted the inadequacy of the 
theory of natural selection, even in biology, the field of its first 
observation, to account for all the facts ; while countless phenom- 
ena in other regions, such as the mechanical principles involved in 
the structure of the universe, the laws of crystallography and chem- 
ical combination, the beauty of nature taken in connection with its 
effect upon the mind, irresistibly suggest design, and render the 
alternative hypothesis, from its mere mathematical improbability, 
almost inconceivable. And there is now, therefore, a general dis- 
position to admit that the force of this particular attack upon the 
doctrine of final causes has been considerably overstated. 

But in the course of its discussion an important difference has 
been brought to light between external and internal purposes or 
ends. The kind of design in nature which first arrested early think- 
ers was its usefulness to man. Even in scenery, it has been sug- 
gested, they saw the utility before the beauty. And so they came 
to look upon all natural phenomena as having for their final cause 
the good of man ; and the world as a machine, a contrivance of 
which the parts have no value except as contributing to the work 
of the whole, and the whole exists only to produce a result outside 
and independent of itself, an external end, as if corn should exist 
solely to provide food for man. This was not an untrue concep- 
tion ; a shallow thing to say of the reason for which Socrates 
believed in God : but it was partial and inadequate, as Bacon and 
Spinoza showed. And we have now come to regard the world, not 
as a machine, but as an organism, a system in which, while the 
parts contribute to the growth of the whole, the whole also reacts 
upon the development of the parts ; and whose primary purpose is 
its own perfection, something that is contained within and not 
outside itself, an internal end : while in their turn the myriad parts 
of this universal organism are also lesser organisms, ends in and for 
themselves, pursuing each its lonely ideal of individual complete- 
ness. Now when we look at nature in this way, and watch the 
complex and subtle processes by which a crystal, a leaf, a lily, a 
moth, a bird, a star realize their respective ideals with undisturbed, 
unfailing accuracy, we cannot help attributing them to an intelli- 
gent Creator. But when we further find that in the very course of 
pursuing their primary ends, and becoming perfect after their kind, 
the various parts of the universe do in fact also become means, and 
with infinite ingenuity of correspondence and adaptation, subserve 
not only one but a thousand secondary ends, linking and weaving 
themselves together by their mutual ministration into an orderly, 



V. The Incarnation and Development. 159 

harmonious, complicated whole, the signs of intelligence grow 
clearer still. And when, beyond all this, we discover the quality of 
beauty in every moment and situation of this complex life ; the 
drop of water that circulates from sea to cloud, and cloud to earth, 
and earth to plant, and plant to life-blood, shining the while with 
strange spiritual significance in the sunset and the rainbow and the 
dewdrop and the tear ; the universal presence of this attribute, so 
unessential to the course of nature, but so infinitely powerful in its 
appeal to the human mind, is reasonably urged as a crowning proof 
of purposeful design. 

The treatment which these various aspects of teleology have 
received, during the last few years, may be fairly called exhaustive ; 
and the result of all the sifting controversy has been to place the 
evidence for design in nature on a stronger base than ever : partly 
because we feel that we have faced the utmost that can be urged 
against it ; partly because, under scientific guidance, we have 
acquired a more real, as distinct from a merely notional apprehen- 
sion of the manifold adaptations of structure to function, which 
the universe presents ; and these adaptations and correspondences, 
when grasped in their infinite multiplicity, furnish us with a far 
worthier and grander view of teleology than the mechanical theory 
of earlier days. 

All this is in perfect harmony with our Christian creed, that all 
things were made by the Eternal Reason ; but more than this, it 
illustrates and is illustrated by the further doctrine of His indwell- 
ing presence in the things of His creation ; rendering each of 
them at once a revelation and a prophecy, a thing of beauty and 
finished workmanship, worthy to exist for its own sake, and yet a 
step to higher purposes, an instrument for grander work. 

1 God tastes an infinite joy 
In infinite ways — one everlasting bliss, 
From whom all being emanates, all power 
Proceeds ; in whom is life for evermore, 
Yet whom existence in its lowest form 
Includes ; where dwells enjoyment, there is He : 
With still a flying point of bliss remote, 
A happiness in store afar, a sphere 
Of distant glory in full view.' 

And science has done us good service in recalling this doctrine 
to mind. For it has a religious as well as a theological importance, 
constituting, as it does, the element of truth in that higher Panthe- 
ism which is so common in the present day. Whether the term 
' higher Pantheism ' is happily chosen or not, the thing which it 



160 The Religion of the Incarnation, 

denotes is quite distinct from Pantheism proper, with its logical 
denial of human personality and freedom. It is the name of an emo- 
tion rather than a creed ; that indescribable mystic emotion which 
the poet, the artist, the man of science, and all their kindred feel 
in contemplating the beauty or the wonder of the world. Vague 
as it is, and indefinite, this sentiment is still one of the strongest 
of which our nature is susceptible, and should be recognized 
as an integral element in all true religion. Yet for want of such 
recognition on the part of Christians it is often allowed to gravitate 
nearer and nearer to pure Pantheism, with which it has, in reality, 
no essential affinity. We cannot therefore overestimate the impor- 
tance of restoring to its due place in theology the doctrine of the 
Divine immanence in nature to which this sentiment is the instinc- 
tive witness. Fathers, schoolmen, mystics, who were quite as 
alive to any danger of Pantheism as ourselves, yet astonish us by 
the boldness of their language upon this point ; and we need not 
fear to transgress the limits of the Christian tradition in saying that 
the physical immanence of God the Word in His creation can 
hardly be overstated, as long as His moral transcendence of it is 
also kept in view. 

' God dwelleth within all things, and without all things, above all 
things and beneath all things,' x says St. Gregory the Great. 

1 The immediate operation of the Creator is closer to everything 
than the operation of any secondary cause,' says St. Thomas. 2 

And Cornelius a Lapide, after comparing our dependence upon 
God to that of a ray on the sun, an embyro on the womb, a bird 
on the air, concludes with the words, ' Seeing then that we are thus 
united to God physically, we ought also to be united to Him 
morally.' 3 

Here are three typical theologians, in three different ages, not 
one of them a mystic even, using as the language of sober theology 
words every whit as strong as any of the famous Pantheistic pas- 
sages in our modern literature ; and yet when met with in that 
literature they are commonly regarded as pleasing expressions of 
poetic dreams, very far away from, if not even inconsistent with 
what is thought to be dogmatic Christianity. 

To sum up, then, the reopening of the teleological question has 
not only led to its fuller and more final answer, but has inciden- 
tally contributed to revive among us an important aspect of the 
Theology of the Word. 

1 Mag. Mor., ii. 12. 2 St. Thorn. Aq., ii. Sent. i. 1. 

3 In Act. Apost, c. 17. v. 28. 



v. The Incarnation and Development. 161 

The next point upon which the theory of evolution came in 
contact with received opinion, was its account of the origin of 
man. Man, it was maintained, in certain quarters, was only the 
latest and most complex product of a purely material process of 
development. His reason, with all its functions of imagination, 
conscience, will, was only a result of his sensibility, and that of his 
nervous tissue, and that again of matter less and less finely organ- 
ized, till at last a primitive protoplasm was reached ; while what 
had been called his fall was in reality his rise, being due to the 
fact that with the birth of reason came self-consciousness ; or the 
feeling of a distinction between self and the outer world, ripening 
into a sense, and strictly speaking an illusory sense, of discord 
between the two. 

Theologians first thought it necessary to contest every detail of 
this development, beginning with the antiquity of man ; and some 
are still inclined to intrench themselves in one or two positions 
which they think impregnable, such as the essential difference in 
kind between organized and inorganic matter, or again between 
animal instinct and the self-conscious reason of man ; while others 
are content to assume a sceptical attitude and point to the dis- 
agreement between the men of science themselves, as sufficient 
evidence of their untruth. But none of these views are theologi- 
cally needed. The first is certainly, the second possibly unsound, 
and the third, to say the least of it, unkind. It is quite true that 
the evolution of man is at present nothing more than an hypo- 
thesis, and an hypothesis open to very grave scientific objections. 
The attempts to analyze reason and conscience back into uncon- 
scious and unmoral elements, for all their unquestioned ingenuity, 
are still far from being conclusive ; and then there is the geological 
admissibility of the time which it would require, and that is still a 
matter of hopeless controversy between scientific experts. And 
even if these and numerous kindred difficulties were to be removed 
in time to come, the hypothesis would still be no nearer demon- 
stration ; for the only evidence we can possibly obtain of prehistoric 
man is his handiwork of one kind or another, his implements or 
pictures, things implying the use of reason. In other words, we 
can only prove his existence through his rationality ; through his 
having been, on the point in question, identical in kind with what 
now he is. And suspense of judgment therefore upon the whole 
controversy is, at present, the only scientific state of mind. 

But there are facts upon the other side : the undoubted antiquity 
of the human race ; the gradual growth which can be scientifically 
traced, in our thought and language and morality, and therefore, to 



1 62 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

the extent that functions react upon their faculties, even in our 
conscience and our reason too ; and then the immense presump- 
tion from the gathering proofs of all other development, that 
man will be no exception to the universal law. All these positive 
indications at least suggest the possibility that the difficulties of the 
theory may one day vanish, and its widest chasms close. And we 
cannot therefore be too emphatic in asserting that theology would 
have nothing whatever to fear from such a result. When we see 
energy and atoms building up an harmonious order, we feel there 
is an inner secret in the energy and atoms, which we cannot hope 
to penetrate by merely watching them at work. And so, when we 
see human minds and wills weaving a veil over the universe, of 
thought and love and holiness, and are told that all these things 
are but higher modes of material nature, we only feel that the inner 
secret of material nature must be yet more wonderful than we sup- 
posed. But though our wonder may increase, our difficulties will 
not. If we believe, as we have seen that Christian Theology has 
always believed, in a Divine Creator not only present behind the 
beginning of matter, but immanent in its every phase, and co-operat- 
ing with its every phenomenon, the method of His working, though 
full of speculative interest, will be of no controversial importance. 
Time was when the different kinds of created things were thought 
to be severed by impassable barriers. But many of these barriers 
have already given way before science, and species are seen to be 
no more independent than the individuals that compose them. If 
the remaining barriers between unreason and reason, or between 
lifelessness and life should in like manner one day vanish, we shall 
need to readjust the focus of our spiritual eye to the enlarged 
vision, but nothing more. Our Creator will be known to have 
worked otherwise indeed than we had thought, but in a way quite 
as conceivable, and to the imagination more magnificent. And 
all is alike covered by the words ' without Him was not anything 
made that was made : and in Him was life.' In fact the evolu- 
tionary origin of man is a far less serious question than the attack 
upon final causes. Its biblical aspect has grown insignificant in 
proportion as we have learned to regard the Hebrew cosmology 
in a true light. And the popular outcry which it raised was largely 
due to sentiment, and sentiment not altogether untinged by human 
pride. 

We may pass on therefore from the evolution of man and his 
mind in general, to his various modes of mental activity in science 
and philosophy and art. Here the Christian doctrine is twofold : 
first, that all the objects of our thought, mathematical relations, 



v. The Incarnation and Development. 163 

scientific laws, social systems, ideals of art, are ideas of the Divine 
Wisdom, the Logos, written upon the pages of the world ; and 
secondly, that our power of reading them, our thinking faculty 
acts and only can act rightly by Divine assistance ; that the same 
* motion and power that impels ' ' all objects of all thought ' impels 
also ' all thinking things.' And both these statements are met by 
objection. In the first place, it is urged, there is no fixity in the 
universe, and it cannot therefore be the embodiment of Divine 
ideas. All things live and move under our eyes. Species bear no 
evidence of having been created in their completeness; on the 
contrary, they are perpetually undergoing transmutation, and cannot 
therefore represent ideas" cannot have been created on a plan. For 
ideas, in proportion to their perfection, must be definite, clean-cut, 
clear. The answer to this objection is contained in what has been 
already said upon the subject of organic teleology. But an anal- 
ogy drawn from human thinking may illustrate it further. It is in 
reality the ideas which our mind has done with, its dead ideas 
which are clean-cut and definite and fixed. The ideas which at 
any moment go to form our mental life are quick and active and 
full of movement, and melt into each other and are ever develop- 
ing anew. A book is no sooner finished and done with, than it 
strikes its author as inadequate. It becomes antiquated as soon as 
its ideas have been assimilated by the public mind. And that 
because the thought of author and public alike is alive, and ever 
moving onward ; incapable of being chained to any one mode of 
expression ; incapable of being stereotyped. The highest notion 
we can frame therefore of a mind greater than our own is of one 
that has no dead ideas, no abstract or antiquated formulas, but 
whose whole content is entirely, essentially alive. And the perpet- 
ual development which we are learning to trace throughout the 
universe around us would be the natural expression therefore of 
that Logos Who is the Life. 

But when we turn from the objective to the subjective side of 
knowledge, we are met with a second objection. The doctrine 
that the Divine Logos co-operates with the human reason, is 
supposed to be inconsistent with the undoubted fact that many 
earnest and successful thinkers have been, if not atheistic, at least 
agnostic ; unable, that is, to attain to the very knowledge to which, 
as it would seem on the Christian hypothesis, all intellectual effort 
should inevitably lead. But this difficulty is only superficial. When 
we say that the Divine reason assists, we do not mean that it super- 
sedes the human. An initiative still lies with man ; and he must 
choose of his own accord the particular field of his intellectual 



164 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

pursuit. When he has chosen his line of study, and followed it 
with the requisite devotion, he will arrive at the kind of truth to 
which that particular study leads, the physicist at laws of nature, 
the philosopher at laws of thought, the artist at ideal beauty, the 
moralist at ethical truth; and in each case, as we believe, by Divine 
assistance, his discoveries being in fact revelations. But the 
method, the education, the experience involved in different studies 
are so distinct that few in a lifetime can reach the eminence that 
teaches with authority, or even the intelligence that thoroughly 
appreciates, more than one department of the complex world of 
thought. And if a man wanders from his own province into unfa- 
miliar regions, he naturally meets with failure in proportion to his 
hardihood. In the case of the special sciences this is universally 
recognized. No astronomer would think of dogmatizing on a 
question of geology, nor a biologist on the details of chemistry or 
physics. But when it is a question between science and philoso- 
phy, the rule is often forgotten ; and the spectacle of scientific 
specialists blundering about in metaphysics is painfully common in 
the present day : while strange to say, in the case of theology this 
forgetfulness reaches a climax, and men claim casually to have an 
opinion upon transcendent mysteries, without any of the prepara- 
tion which they would be the first to declare needful for success in 
the smallest subsection of any one of the branches of science. 

Nor is preparation all that is wanted. Science is impossible 
without experiment, and experiment is the lower analogue of what 
in religion is called experience. As experiment alone gives cer- 
tainty in the one case, so does experience alone in the other. And 
it is only the man who has undergone such experience, with all its 
imperative demands upon his whole character and life, that can 
justly expect satisfaction of his religious doubts and needs ; while 
only those who, like St. Paul or St. Augustine, have experienced it 
in an exceptional degree, are entitled to speak with authority upon 
the things to which it leads. Here again a human analogy may 
help us. For in studying a human character there are different 
planes upon which we may approach it. There are the external 
aspects of the man, the fashion of his garments, the routine of his 
life, the regulation of his time, his official habits ; all which, it may 
be noted in passing, in the case of a great character, are uniform, 
not because they were not once the free creation of his will, but 
because he knows the practical value of uniformity in all such 
things ; and all these externals are open to the observation even of 
a stranger. Then there are the man's thoughts, which may be 
withheld or revealed at his pleasure ; and these can only be under- 



v. The Incamatio7i and Development. 165 

stood by kindred minds, who have been trained to understand them. 
Lastly, there are his will and affections, the region of his motives, 
the secret chamber in which his real personality resides ; and these 
are only known to those intimate friends and associates whose 
intuition is quickened by the sympathy of love. Now all these 
stages are gone through in the formation of a friendship. First we 
are struck by a man's appearance, and so led to listen to his con- 
versation, and thence to make his acquaintance, and at last to 
become his friend. And so with the knowledge of God. The man 
of science, as such, can discover the uniformities of His action in 
external nature. The moral philosopher will further see that these 
actions ' make for righteousness ' and that there is a moral law. 
But it is only to the spiritual yearning of our whole personality 
that He reveals Himself as a person. This analogy will make the 
Christian position intelligible ; but for Christians it is more than an 
analogy. It is simply a statement of facts. For, to Christians, the 
Incarnation is the final sanction of ' anthropomorphism,' revealing 
the Eternal Word as strictly a Person, in the ordinary sense and 
with all the attributes which we commonly attach to the name. 1 

Consequently, upon all this we are quite consistent in main- 
taining that all great teachers of whatever kind are vehicles of 
revelation, each in his proper sphere, and in accepting their 
verified conclusions as Divinely true ; while we reject them the 
moment they transgress their limits, as thereby convicted of unsound 
thinking, and therefore deprived of the Divine assistance which 
was the secret of their previous success. And though such trans- 
gression may in many cases involve a minimum of moral error, there 
are abundant instances in the history of thought that it is not always 
so. Francis Bacon, and the penitent, pardoned Abelard are typical, 
in different degrees, of a countless multitude of lesser men. 

' For our knowledge of first principles,' says St. Augustine, l we 
have recourse to that inner truth that presides over the mind. 
And that indwelling teacher of the mind is Christ, the changeless 
virtue and eternal wisdom of God, to which every rational soul 
has recourse. But so much only is revealed to each as his own 
good or evil will enables him to receive.' 2 

'Nor is it the fault of the Word,' adds St. Thomas, 'that all 
men do not attain to the knowledge of the truth, but some remain 
in darkness. It is the fault of men who do not turn to the Word 
and so cannot fully receive Him. Whence there is still more or 
less darkness remaining among men, in proportion to the lesser 

1 C P- r- 53- 2 St. Aug, de Magist., 38, t. i. p. g\6. 



1 66 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

or greater degree in which they turn to the Word and receive Him. 
And so John, to preclude any thought of deficiency in the illumi- 
nating power of the Word, after saying " that life was the light of 
men," adds " the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness com- 
prehended it not." The darkness is not because the W T ord does 
not shine, but because some do not receive the light of the Word ; 
as while the light of the material sun is shining over the world, it 
is. only dark to those whose eyes are closed or feeble.' 1 

It has been necessary to dwell upon this doctrine because it has 
an important bearing upon two further questions, which the phi- 
losophy of evolution has brought into new prominence, the relation 
of Christianity to previous philosophy and other religions. It was 
the fashion, not long ago, to give an undue value to the part played 
by environment or surrounding circumstances in the creation of 
characters and institutions and creeds, to the exclusion of all 
elements of native originality. And the attempt was made accord- 
ingly, in various ways, to represent Christianity as the natural 
product of the different religions and philosophies which were 
current in the world at the time of its appearing. But the further 
study of evolution has qualified this whole mode of thought by the 
way in which, as we have seen above, it has led us to look at things 
as organisms rather than machines. A machine has no internal 
principle of unity. Its unity is impressed upon it from without. 
And it may be granted therefore, for the sake of argument, that 
we might conceive a machine or number of machines as formed 
like the patterns in a kaleidoscope by a happy coincidence of 
atoms ; and man, if he were only a machine, as strictly the creature 
of circumstance. But an organism is a different thing. Depend- 
ent as it is upon its environment in a hundred various ways, it 
is yet more dependent upon its own selective and assimilative 
capacity, in other words upon its own individuality, its self. And 
so the notions of individuality, originality, personal identity have 
been restored to their place in the world of thought. The old 
error lingers on, and is sometimes crudely re-asserted, especially in 
its anti-Christian bearing ; but it has been discredited by science, 
and is in fact a thing of the past. And in consequence of this, 
the attempt can no longer be plausibly made to account for Chris- 
tianity apart from the personality of Jesus Christ. The mythical 
theories have had their day. And it is recognized on all hands 
that mere aspiration can no more create a religion than appetite 
can create food. A foundation needs a founder. 

1 St. Thorn. Aq., cont. Gent., iv. 13. 



v. The' Incarnation and Development. 167 

But the attack thus diverted from our religion glances off on our 
theology. The Christian religion, it is granted, was founded by 
Jesus Christ ; but its theological interpretation is viewed as a mis- 
interpretation, a malign legacy from the dying philosophies of 
Greece. This objection is as old as the second century, and has 
been revived at intervals in various forms, and with varying 
degrees of success. Modern historical criticism has only fortified 
it with fresh instances. But it has no force whatever if we believe 
that the Divine Word was forever working in the world in co-op- 
eration with human reason ; inspiring the higher minds among the 
Jews with their thirst for holiness, and so making ready for the 
coming of the Holy One in Jewish flesh : but inspiring the Greeks 
also with their intellectual eagerness, and preparing them to recog- 
nize Him as the Eternal Reason, the Word, the Truth ; and to 
define and defend and demonstrate that Truth to the outer world. 
The fact that Greek philosophy had passed its zenith and was 
declining did not make its influence upon Christianity an evil one, 
a corruption of the living by the dead. It was only dying to be 
incorporated in a larger life. The food that supports our existence 
owes its power of nutrition to the fact that it too once lived with 
an inferior life of its own. And so the Greek philosophy was 
capable of assimilation by the Christian organism, from the fact 
that it too had once been vitally inspired by the life that is the 
light of men. And the true successors of Plato and Aristotle were 
the men of progress who realized this fact ; not Celsus, Lucian, 
Porphyry, but the Fathers of the Church. 

Clement and Origen, Athanasius and Augustine, the Gregories 
and Basil understood Greek philosophy as clearly as St. Paul un- 
derstood Judaism, and recognized its completion as plainly in the 
Incarnation of the Word. Nor was this view of the Incarnation in 
the one case, any more than in the other, assumed for a merely 
apologetic purpose. These men were essentially philosophers, 
among the foremost of their age. They knew and have testified 
what philosophy had done for their souls, and what it could not do ; 
how far it had led them forward ; and of what longings it had left 
them full. True, philosophy had as little expected Wisdom to be- 
come incarnate, and that amongst the barbarians, the outcast and 
the poor, as Judaism had expected Messiah to suffer, and to suffer 
at the hand of Jews. But no sooner was the Incarnation accom- 
plished, than it flooded the whole past of Greece no less than 
Judsea with a new light. This was what it all meant ; this was 
what it unwittingly aimed at ; the long process of dialectic and 
prophecy were here united in their goal. 



1 68 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

1 Those who lived under the guidance of the Eternal Reason 
(/jLtTa Xoyov jSioycravTes) as Socrates. Heraclitus, and such-like men,. 
are Christians/ run the well-known words of Justin Martyr, ' even 
though they were reckoned to be atheists in their day ' (Ap., i. 46). 
Different minds have always differed, and will continue to differ 
widely as to the degree in which Greek thought contributed to the 
doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. It is a difficult and 
delicate question for historical criticism to decide. But the essen- 
tial thing to bear in mind is that the Christian doctrine of the 
Logos amply covers any possible view which criticism may estab- 
lish upon the point. For, in the light of that doctrine, it is merely 
a question of the degree in which the Eternal Word chose to reveal 
Himself through one agency rather than another. 

Any attack, therefore, upon our theology for its connection with 
Greek thought, is powerless to disturb us ; since we accept the 
fact but give it another, a deeper interpretation : while we rejoice 
in every fresh proof that the great thoughts of the Greek mind 
were guided by a higher power, and consecrated to a nobler end 
than ever their authors dreamed of ; and that the true classic cul- 
ture is no alien element but a legitimate ingredient in Catholic, 
complete Christianity. 

And the same line of thought gives us a clew to the history of 
religious development, the latest field to which the philosophy of 
evolution has been extended. For though a superficial comparison 
of religions, with a more or less sceptical result, has often been 
attempted before, as for instance in the thirteenth century, with its 
well-known story of the three impostors ; anything like a scientific 
study of them has been impossible till now. For now-for the first 
time we are beginning to have the facts before us ; the facts con- 
sisting in the original documents of the various historic creeds, and 
accumulated observations on the religious ideas of uncivilized races. 
In both these fields very much remains to be done ; but still there 
is enough done already to justify a few generalizations. But the 
subject is intensely complex, and there has been far too great a 
tendency, as in all new sciences, to rush to premature conclusions. 
For example, there is the shallow scepticism which seizes upon 
facts, like the many parallelisms between the moral precepts of ear- 
lier religions and the Sermon on the Mount, as a convincing proof 
that Christianity contains nothing that is new. No serious student 
of comparative religions would justify such an inference ; but it is 
a very common and mischievous fallacy in the half-culture of the 
day. Then there is the rash orthodoxy, that is over eager to 
accept any result that tallies with its own preconceived opinions, as, 



v. The Incarnation and Development. 169 

for instance, the belief in a primitive monotheism. No doubt sev- 
eral very competent authorities think that the present evidence 
points in that direction. But a majority of critics equally compe- 
tent think otherwise. And meanwhile, there is a mass of evidence 
still waiting collection and interpretation, which may one day throw 
further light upon the point. Under such circumstances, therefore, 
it is as impolitic as it is unscientific to identify Christian apology 
with a position which may one day prove untenable. Attention 
has already been called to a similar imprudence in connection with 
Biogenesis, and the history of past apology is full of warnings 
against such conduct. Then, again, there is the converse view 
which is often as glibly stated as if it were already a scientific 
truism, — the view that religion was evolved out of non-religious ele- 
ments, such as the appearance of dead ancestors in dreams. This 
rests, to begin with, on the supposition that the opinions of uncivil- 
ized man, as we now find him, are the nearest to those of man in 
his primitive condition ; which, considering that degradation is a 
recognized factor in history, and that degradation acts more power- 
fully in religion than in any other region, is a very considerable 
assumption. But even granting this, the psychological possibility 
of the process in question, as well as the lapse of time sufficient for 
its operation, are both as yet unproved. It is an hypothetical pro- 
cess, happening in an hypothetical period ; but, logically considered, 
nothing more. 

All this should make us cautious in approaching the comparative 
study of religions. Still, even in its present stage, it has reached 
some general results. In the first place, the universality of religion 
is established as an empirical fact. Man, with a few insignificant 
exceptions which may fairly be put down to degradation, within 
the limits of our observation, is everywhere religious. The notion 
that religion was an invention of interested priestcraft has vanished, 
like many other eighteenth century fictions, before nineteenth cen- 
tury science. Even in the savage races, where priestcraft is most 
conspicuous, the priest has never created the religion, but always 
the religion the priest. Beyond this fact it is unsafe to dogmatize. 
There is abundant evidence of early nature-worship in very various 
forms ; but whether this was the degraded offspring of purer concep- 
tions, or, as is more generally supposed, the primitive parent from 
which those conceptions sprang, is still an open question. The 
universality of the fact is all that is certain. 

Again, there is a progressive tendency observable in the reli- 
gions of the world ; but the progress is of a particular kind, and 
largely counteracted by degeneracy. Individuals elevate, masses 



170 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

degrade religion. There is no progress by insensible modifications ; 
no improvement of a religion in committee. Councils like those 
of Asoka or Chosroes can only sift and popularize and publish 
what it needed a Buddha or Zarathustra to create. And so reli- 
gion is handed on, from one great teacher to another, never rising 
above the level of its founder or last reformer, till another founder 
or reformer comes ; while in the interval it is materialized, vulgar- 
ized, degraded. 

And from the nature of this progress, as the work of great indi- 
viduals, another consequence has historically followed ; viz., that all 
the pre-Christian religions have been partial, have emphasized, that 
is to say, unduly if not exclusively, one requirement or another of 
the religious consciousness, but never its complex whole. For the 
individual teacher, however great, cannot proclaim with prophetic 
intensity more than one aspect of a truth ; and his followers inva- 
riably tend to isolate and exaggerate this aspect, while any who 
attempt to supply its complement are regarded with suspicion. 
Hence the parties and sects and heresies of which religious history 
is full. The simplest illustration of this is the fundamental distinc- 
tion between Theism and Pantheism, or the transcendence and 
immanence of God ; the one often said to be a Semitic, the other 
an Aryan, tendency of thought. But however this may be, both 
these principles must be represented in any system which would 
really satisfy the whole of our religious instincts ; while, as a matter 
of fact, they were separated by all the pre-Christian religions, and 
are separated by Mahometanism and Buddhism, the only two reli- 
gious systems which compete with Christianity to-day. 

These, then, are a. few broad results of our comparative survey 
of religions. That religion, however humble the mode of its first 
appearing, is yet universal to man. That it progresses through the 
agency of the great individual, the unique personality, the spiritual 
genius ; while popular influence is a counter agent and makes for 
its decay. That its various developments have all been partial, and 
therefore needed completion, if the cravings of the human spirit 
were ever to be set at rest. 

And all this is in perfect harmony with our Christian belief in a 
God Who, from the day of man's first appearance in the dim twi- 
light of the world, left not Himself without witness in sun and 
moon, and rain and storm-cloud, and the courses of the stars, and 
the promptings of conscience, and the love of kin ; and Who the 
while was lighting every man that cometh into the world, the pri- 
meval hunter, the shepherd chieftain, the poets of the Vedas and 
the Gathas, the Chaldaean astronomer, the Egyptian priest, each, 



V. The Incarnation and Development. 171 

at least in a measure, to spell that witness out aright ; ever and anon 
when a heart was ready revealing Himself with greater clearness, 
to one or another chosen spirit, and by their means to other men ; 
till at length in the fulness of time, when Jews were yearning for 
one in whom righteousness should triumph, visibly ; and Greeks 
sighing over the divorce between truth and power, and wondering 
whether the wise man ever would indeed be king ; and artists and 
ascetics wandering equally astray, in vain attempt to solve the prob- 
lem of the spirit and the flesh ; ' the Word was made Flesh and 
dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.' The pre-Christian reli- 
gions were the age-long prayer. The Incarnation was the answer. 
Nor are we tied to any particular view of the prehistoric stages of 
this development. We only postulate that whenever and however 
man became truly man, he was from that moment religious, or 
capable of religion ; and this postulate deals with the region that 
lies beyond the reach of science, though all scientific observation 
is, as we have seen, directly in its favor. 

In short, the history of the pre-Christian religions is like that of 
pre-Christian philosophy, a long preparation for the Gospel. We 
are familiar enough with this thought in its Jewish application from 
the teaching of the Epistle to the Hebrews. But it seems to be 
often forgotten that the principles laid down in that Epistle admit 
of no limitation to any single race of men. They are naturally 
illustrated from Hebrew history in a writing addressed to Hebrews. 
But their scope is universal. They compel their own application 
to every religious history, which the growth of our knowledge 
brings to light. And from this point of view the many pagan 
adumbrations of Christian doctrine, similarities of practice, coin- 
cidences of ritual, analogies of phrase and symbol, fall naturally 
into place. The Fathers and early missionaries were often per- 
plexed by these phenomena, and did not scruple to attribute them 
to diabolic imitation. And even in the present day they are capa- 
ble of disturbing timid minds, when unexpectedly presented before 
them. But all this is unphilosophical, for in the light of evolution 
the occurrence of such analogies is a thing to be expected ; while 
to the eye of faith they do but emphasize the claim of Christianity 
to be universal, by showing that it contains in spiritual summary the 
religious thoughts and practices and ways of prayer and worship, 
not of one people only, but of all the races of men. 

' In the whole of our Christian faith,' says Thomassin, ' there is 
nothing which does not in the highest degree harmonize with that 
natural philosophy which Wisdom, who made all things, infused 
into every created mind, and wrote upon the very marrow of the 



172 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

reason; so that, however obscured by the foul pleasures of the 
senses, it never can be wholly done away. It was this hidden and 
intimate love of the human mind, however marred, for the incor- 
ruptible truth, which won the whole world over to the gospel of 
Christ, when once that Gospel was proclaimed.' x 

But when all this has been said, there is a lingering suspicion in 
many minds, that even if the details of the doctrine of develop- 
ment are not inconsistent with Christianity, its whole drift is incom- 
patible with any system of opinion which claims to possess finality. 
And if Christianity were only a system of opinion, the objection 
might be plausible enough. But its claim to possess finality rests 
upon its further claim to be much more than a system of opinion. 
The doctrine of development or evolution, we must remember, is 
not a doctrine of limitless change, like the old Greek notion of 
perpetual flux. Species once developed are seen to be persistent, 
in proportion to their versatility, their pow r er, i. e. } of adapting 
themselves to the changes of the world around them. And because 
man, through his mental capacity, possesses this power to an almost 
unlimited extent, the human species is virtually permanent. Now 
in scientific language, the Incarnation may be said to have intro- 
duced a new species into the world, — a Divine man transcending 
past humanity, as humanity transcended the rest of the animal 
creation, and communicating His vital energy by a spiritual process 
to subsequent generations of men. And thus viewed, there is 
nothing unreasonable in the claim of Christianity to be at least as 
permanent as the race which it has raised to a higher power, and 
endued with a novel strength. 

III. But in saying this we touch new ground. As long as we 
confine ourselves to speaking of the Eternal Word as operating in 
the mysterious region which lies behind phenomena, we are safe, 
it may be said, from refutation, because we are dealing with the 
unknown. But when we go on to assert that He has flashed 
through our atmosphere, and been seen of men, scintillating signs 
and wonders in His path, we are at once open to critical attack. 
And this brings us to the real point at issue between Christianity 
and its modern opponents. It is not the substantive body of our 
knowledge, but the critical faculty which has been sharpened in its 
acquisition that really comes in conflict w 7 ith our creed. Assuming 
Christianity to be true, there is, as we have seen, nothing in it 
inconsistent with any ascertained scientific fact. But what is called 
the negative criticism assumes that it cannot be true, because the 

1 Thomassin, Incarn., i. 15. 



v. The Iticamation and Development. 173 

miraculous element in it contradicts experience. Still criticism is 
a very different thing from science, a subjective thing into which 
imagination and personal idiosyncrasy enter largely, and which 
needs therefore in its turn to be rigorously criticised. And the 
statement that Christianity contradicts experience suggests two 
reflections, in limine. 

In the first place, the origin of all things is mysterious, the ori- 
gin of matter, the origin of energy, the origin of life, the origin of 
thought. And present experience is no criterion of any of these 
things. What were their birth-throes, what were their accompany- 
ing signs and wonders, when the morning stars sang together in the 
dawn of their appearing, we do not and cannot know. If, there- 
fore, the Incarnation was, as Christians believe, another instance of 
a new beginning, present experience will neither enable us to assert 
or deny, what its attendant circumstances may or may not have 
been. The logical impossibility of proving a negative is proverbial. 
And on a subject whose conditions are unknown to us, the very 
attempt becomes ridiculous. And secondly, it is a mistake to sup- 
pose that as a matter of strict evidence, the Christian Church has 
ever rested its claims upon its miracles. A confirmatory factor, 
indeed, in a complication of converging arguments, they have been, 
and still are to many minds. But to others, who in the present 
day are probably the larger class, it is not so easy to believe 
Christianity on account of miracles, as miracles on account of Chris- 
tianity. For now, as ever, the real burden of the proof of Chris- 
tianity is to be sought in our present experience. 

There is a fact of experience as old as history, as widely spread 
as is the human race, and more intensely, irresistibly, importun- 
ately real than all the gathered experience of art and policy and 
science, — the fact which philosophers call moral evil, and Chris- 
tians sin. It rests upon no questionable interpretation of an East- 
ern allegory. We breathe it, we feel it, we commit it, we see its 
havoc all around us. It is no dogma, but a sad, solemn, inevitable 
fact. The animal creation has a law of its being, a condition of its 
perfection, which it instinctively and invariably pursues. Man has 
a law of his being, a condition of his perfection, which he instinct- 
ively tends to disobey. And what he does to-day, he has been 
doing from the first record of his existence. 

Video meliora proboque, 
Deteriora sequor. 

Philosophers have from time to time attempted to explain this 
dark experience away, and here and there men of happy tempera- 



174 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

ment, living among calm surroundings, have been comparatively 
unconscious of the evil in the world. But the common conscience 
is alike unaffected by the ingenuity of the one class, or the apathy 
of the other ; while it thrills to the voices of men like St. Paul or 
St. Augustine, Dante or John Bunyan, Loyola or Luther ; recog- 
nizing in their sighs and tears and lamentations, the echo of its own 
unutterable sorrow made articulate. Nor is sin confined to one 
department of our being. It poisons the very springs of life, and 
taints its every action. It corrupts art ; it hampers science; it 
paralyzes the efforts of the politician and the patriot ; and diseased 
bodies, and broken hearts, and mental and spiritual agony, are 
amongst its daily, its hourly results. It would seem indeed super- 
fluous to insist upon these things, if their importance were not so 
often ignored in the course of anti-Christian argument. But when 
we are met by an appeal to experience, it is necessary to insist that 
no element of experience be left out. 

And moral evil, independently of any theory of its nature or its 
origin, is a plain palpable fact, and a fact of such stupendous mag- 
nitude as to constitute by far the most serious problem of our life. 

Now it is also a fact of present experience that there are scat- 
tered throughout Christendom, men of every age, temperament, 
character, and antecedents, for whom this problem is practically 
solved ; men who have a personal conviction that their own past sins 
are done away with, and the whole grasp of evil upon them loos- 
ened, and who in consequence rise to heights of character and con- 
duct, which they know that they would never have otherwise attained. 
And all this they agree to attribute, in however varying phrases, 
to the personal influence upon them of Jesus Christ. Further, 
these men had a spiritual ancestry. Others in the last generation 
believed and felt and acted as they now act and feel and believe. 
And so their lineage can be traced backward, age by age, swelling 
into a great multitude whom no man can number, till we come to 
the historic records of Him Whom they all look back to, and find 
that He claimed the power on earth to forgive sins. And there the 
phenomenon ceases. Pre-Christian antiquity contains nothing anal- 
ogous to it. Consciousness of sin, and prayers for pardon, and 
purgatorial penances, and sacrifices, and incantations, and magic 
formulae are there in abundance ; and hopes, among certain races, 
of the coming of a great deliverer. But never the same sense of 
sin forgiven, nor the consequent rebound of the enfranchised 
soul. Yet neither a code of morality which was not essentially 
new, nor the example of a life receding with every age into a dim- 
mer past, would have been adequate to produce this result. It has 



v. The Incarnation and Development. 175 

all the appearance of being, what it historically has claimed to be, 
the entrance of an essentially new life into the world, quickening 
its palsied energies, as with an electric touch. And the more we 
realize in the bitterness of our own experience, or that of others, 
the essential malignity of moral evil, the more strictly supernatural 
does this energy appear. When, therefore, we are told that mira- 
cles contradict experience, we point to the daily occurrence of this 
spiritual miracle and ask ' whether is it easier to say, Thy sins be 
forgiven thee, or to say, Arise and walk ? ' We meet experience 
with experience, the negative experience that miracles have not 
happened with the positive experience that they are happening 
now : an old argument, which so far from weakening, modern sci- 
ence has immensely strengthened, by its insistence on the intimate 
union between material and spiritual things. For spirit and matter, 
as we call them, are now known to intermingle and blend, and 
fringe off, and fade into each other, in a way that daily justifies us 
more in our belief that the possessor of the key to one must be the 
possessor of the key to both, and that He Who can save the soul 
can raise the dead. 

Here, then, is our answer to the negative criticism, or rather to 
the negative hypothesis, by which many critics are misled. Of 
course we do not expect for it unanimous assent. It is founded 
on a specific experience ; and strangers to that experience are 
naturally unable to appreciate its force. But neither should they 
claim to judge it. For the critic of an experience must be its 
expert. And the accumulated verdict of the spiritual experts of 
all ages should at least meet with grave respect from the very men 
who are most familiar with the importance of the maxim, ' Cuique 
in sua arte credendum.' Christianity distinctly declines to be 
proved first and practised afterwards. Its practice and its proof 
go hand in hand. And its real evidence is its power. 

We now see why the Atonement has often assumed such exclu- 
sive prominence in the minds of Christian men. They have felt 
that it was the secret of their own regenerate life, their best intel- 
lectual apology, their most attractive missionary appeal ; and so 
have come to think that the other aspects of the Incarnation might 
be banished from the pulpit and the market-place, to the seclusion 
of the schools. But this has proved to be a fatal mistake. Truth 
cannot be mutilated with impunity. And this gradual substitution 
of a detached doctrine for a catholic creed has led directly to the 
charge which is now so common, that Christianity is inadequate to 
life ; with no message to ordinary men, in their ordinary moments, 



170 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

no bearing upon the aims, occupations, interests, enthusiasms, 
amusements, which are human nature's daily food. 

But we have already seen what a misconception this implies of 
the Incarnation. The Incarnation opened heaven, for it was the 
revelation of the Word ; but it also re-consecrated earth, for the 
Word was made Flesh and dwelt among us. And it is impossible 
to read history without feeling how profoundly the religion of the 
Incarnation has been a religion of humanity. The human body 
itself, which heathendom had so degraded that noble minds could 
only view it as the enemy and prison of the soul, acquired a new 
meaning, exhibited new graces, shone with a new lustre in the 
light of the Word made Flesh ; and thence, in widening circles, 
the family, society, the state, felt in their turn the impulse of the 
Christian spirit, with its 

Touches of things common, 
Till they rose to touch the spheres. 

Literature revived ; art flamed into fuller life ; even science in 
its early days owed more than men often think to the Christian 
temper and the Christian reverence for things once called com- 
mon or unclean, while the optimism, the belief in the future, the 
atmosphere of hopefulness, which has made our progress and 
achievements possible, and which, when all counter-currents have 
been allowed for, so deeply differentiates the modern from the 
ancient world, dates, as a fact of history, from those buoyant days 
of the early Church, when the creed of suicide was vanquished 
before the creed of martyrdom, Seneca before St. Paul. It is true 
that secular civilization has co-operated with Christianity to pro- 
duce the modern world. But secular civilization is, as we have 
seen, in the Christian view, nothing less than the providential cor- 
relative and counterpart of the Incarnation. For the Word did 
not desert the rest of His creation to become Incarnate. Natural 
religion and natural morality and the natural play of intellect have 
their function in the Christian as they had in the pre-Christian 
ages ; and are still kindled by the light that lighteth every man 
coming into the world. And hence it is that secular thought has so-, 
often corrected and counteracted the evil of a Christianity grown 
professional, and false and foul. 

Still, when all allowance for other influence has been made, and 
all the ill done in its name admitted to the full, Christianity re- 
mains, — the only power which has regenerated personal life, and 
that beyond the circle even of its professed adherents, the light of 



v. The Incarnation and Development. 177 

it far outshining the lamp which has held its flame. And personal 
life is after all the battle-ground on which the progress of the 
race must be decided. Nor ever, indeed, should this be more 
apparent than in the present day. For materialism, that old 
enemy alike of the Christian and the human cause, has passed 
from the study to the street. No one, indeed, may regret this 
mere than the high-souled scientific thinker, whose life belies the 
inevitable consequences of his creed. But the ruthless logic of 
human passion is drawing those consequences fiercely ; and the 
luxury of the rich, and the communistic cry of the poor, and 
the desecration of marriage, and the disintegration of society, and 
selfishness in policy, and earthliness in art, are plausibly pleading 
science in their favor. And with all this Christianity claims, as of 
old, to cope, because it is the religion of the Incarnation. For 
the real strength of materialism lies in the justice which it does to 
the material side of nature, — the loveliness of earth and sea and 
sky and sun and star ; the wonder of the mechanism which con- 
trols alike the rushing comet and the falling leaf; the human body 
crowning both, at once earth's fairest flower and most marvellous 
machine. And Christianity is the only religion which does equal 
justice to this truth, while precluding its illegitimate perversion. 
It includes the truth, by the essential importance which it assigns 
to the human body, and therefore to the whole material order, 
with which that body is so intimately one ; while it excludes its 
perversion, by showing the cause of that importance to lie in its 
connection, communion, union with the spirit, and consequent 
capacity for endless degrees of glory. 

And though its own first vocation is to seek and save souls one 
by one, it consecrates in passing every field of thought and action 
wherein the quickened energies of souls may find their scope. 
It welcomes the discoveries of science, as ultimately due to Divine 
revelation and part of the providential education of the world. It 
recalls to art the days when, in catacomb and cloister, she learned 
her noblest mission to be the service of the Word made Flesh. It 
appeals to democracy as the religion of the fishermen who gathered 
round the carpenter's Son. It points the social reformer to the 
pattern of a perfect Man, laying down His life alike for enemy and 
friend. While it crowns all earthly aims with a hope full of immor- 
tality, as prophetic of eternal occupations otherwhere. And how- 
ever many a new meaning may yet be found in the Incarnation, 
however many a misconception of it fade before fuller light, we 
can conceive no phase of progress which has not the Incarnation 

12 



1/8 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

for its guiding- star, no age which cannot make the prayer of the 
fifth century its own : — 

' O God of unchangeable power and eternal light, look favorably 
on Thy whole Church, that wonderful and sacred mystery ; and 
by the tranquil operation of Thy perpetual Providence, carry out 
the work of man's salvation ; and let the whole world feel and see 
that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things 
which had grown old are being made new, and all things are 
returning to perfection through Him, from whom they took their 
origin, even through our Lord Jesus Christ.' l 

1 Gelasian, quoted by Bright, Ancient Collects, p. 98. 



1 






VI. 



THE INCARNATION AS THE BASIS 
OF DOGMA. 



+— 



R • Cy MOBERLY. 



VI. 



THE INCARNATION AS THE BASIS OF 
DOGMA. 

I. Many years ago, in undergraduate days, I was speaking once 
to a friend of my hope of beginning some little acquaintance with 
Theology. I well remember the air of nicely mingled civility and 
contemptuousness, with which my friend, wishing to sympathize, 
at once drew a distinction for me between speculative and dog- 
matic Theology, and assumed that I could not mean that the mere 
study of dogmatic Theology could have any sort of attractiveness. 
I do not think that I accepted his kindly overture ; but it certainly 
made me consider more than once afterwards, whether the ' mere 
study of dogmatic Theology ' could after all be so slavish and 
profitless an employment as had been implied. On the whole, 
however, I settled with myself that his condemnation, however 
obviously candid and even impressive, must nevertheless remain, 
so far as I was concerned, a surprise and an enigma. For what, 
after all, did the study of dogmatic Theology mean, but the study 
of those truths which the mind of Christ's Church upon earth has 
believed to be at once the most certain and the most import- 
ant truths of man's history, nature and destiny, in this world and 
forever ? 

It is impossible, however, not to feel that my friend, in his 
objection, represented what was, and is, a very widespread instinct 
against the study of dogma. Some think, for instance, that to 
practical men exactnesses of doctrinal statement, even if true, are 
immaterial. Others think that any exactness of doctrinal state- 
ment is convicted, by its mere exactness, of untruth ; for that 
knowledge about things unseen can only be indefinite in character. 
If, indeed, religious knowledge is a process of evolution simply, 
if it means only a gradual development towards ever-increasing 
defmiteness of religious supposition, then no doubt its exactness 
may be the condemnation of dogma. But then, no doubt, to 



1 82 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

make room for such a view, the whole fact of historical Christianity 
must be first displaced. 

Is it put as an impossibility, that there cannot be any definite or 
certain Theology ? Can there, then, be a Revelation ? Can there 
be an Incarnation? Those only are consistent, who assert that all 
three are impossible, and who understand that in so doing they are 
limiting the possibilities, and therefore pro tanto questioning the 
reality of a Personal God. But if there be a Personal God, what 
are the adequate grounds on which it is nevertheless laid down 
that He ca?inot directly reveal Himself? Or if He can reveal 
Himself, on what ground can the a priori assertion rest, that theo- 
logical truth must be uncertain or indefinite ? The Christian Church 
claims to have both definite and certain knowledge. These claims 
can never be met by any a priori judgment that such knowledge is 
impossible. Such a judgment is too slenderly based to bear the 
weight of argument. To argue from it would be to commit the very 
fault so often imputed to the dogmatist. It would be a flagrant 
instance of dogmatic assertion (and that for the most important of 
argumentative purposes) of what we could not possibly know. 

The claim of the Church to knowledge through the Incarnation 
can only be rationally met, and only really answered, when the 
claim itself, and its evidence, are seriously examined. Herein lies, 
and will always lie, the heart of the struggle for or against the dog- 
matic character of the Church. Anything else is only the fringe 
of the matter. Any rebutting of a priori presumptions against 
dogma is a mere clearing of the way for battle. Thus it is said, 
perhaps, that the objection is to the degree of defmiteness, or to 
the tone of authority. It is fancied that dogma in its very nature, 
quite apart from its contents, is a curtailment of the rights, and a 
limitation of the powers, of mind. Is dogma, the most definite 
and authoritative, fettering to the freedom of intellect? We can 
see in a moment the entire unreality of the objection, by simply 
substituting for it another question. Is truth fettering to intellect? 
Does the utmost certitude of truth limit freedom of mind? Because, 
if not, dogma, so far as it coincides with truth, cannot fetter either. 
If perfect knowledge of truth could paralyze the intellect, what (it 
is worth while to ask) do we mean by intellect? Do we mean 
something which must forever be struggling with difficulties which 
it cannot overcome ? Is it necessary for the idea of mind that it 
should be baffled ? Is it a creature only of the tangle and the fog ? 
And if ever the day should come, when after struggling, more or 
less ineffectually, with the tangle and the fog, man should emerge 
at last in clear sunshine upon the mountain top, will mind cease 



vi. The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma. 183 

to have any faculty or place, because the knowledge of truth has 
come? At least, if we understand this to be the conception of 
mind, it need not frighten us quite so much as it did, to be told 
that dogma interferes with mind. But if, however different from 
our experience, the employment of mind would be in the presence 
of perfect knowledge, we cannot so conceive of mind as to admit 
that truth could possibly be its enemy or its destruction, then we 
may certainly insist that no amount of dogma, so far as it is true, 
can limit or fetter the freedom of intellect. But then we are at 
once thrown back upon the question : Is the dogmatic teaching of 
the Church true ? No statement which absolutely coincides with 
truth can hurt the freedom of mind. But mistaken presumption 
of truth can, and does, limit it; and so does authority, if it 
prevents the examination of truth. Dogma, then, is, as dogma, a 
wrong to mind, just so far as it can be convicted of either of these 
things ; so far as it forbids examination, or so far as it asserts what 
is not strictly true. 

As to the first of these two suggestions against dogma, it is quite 
enough simply to deny it. The Church, as a teacher of dogmatic 
truth, does not forbid the freest and completest inquiry into the 
truths which she enunciates. The question is not whether dog- 
matic theologians have ever dreaded inquiry into truth ; but 
whether the dogmatic Church, as such, precludes or forbids it. 
True, she enunciates some truths as true ; and holds those, in 
different measures, unwise and wrong, who contradict her truths. 
But she does not, therefore, forbid the fullest exercise of intellect 
upon them ; nor tremble lest intellect, rightly wielded, should con- 
tradict them. Indeed for eighteen centuries she has been engaged, 
and will be engaged to the end, in examining with a power and 
discipline of intellect, which she alone ever has, or could have, 
evoked, into the meaning and exactness of her own knowledge. 
But she does warn inquirers that successful inquiry into her truths 
is no work of merely ingenious disputation, but needs the exactest 
discipline and balance of all the faculties of our human nature. 

We return, then, to the second suggestion ; and I repeat that 
the question has for us become, not whether dogma in the abstract 
is desirable or undesirable, but whether the dogmas of the Chris- 
tian Church are true or not true. Dogma that is true can only be 
undesirable in so far as truth is undesirable. 

Whether the dogmas of the Church are true or not true, is itself 
a question of evidence. 

Before, however, making any remark upon the nature of this 
evidence in the case of religion, we may remember that the pos- 



184 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

session of dogma is in no way peculiar to religion. There is no 
region of research or knowledge which does not present to the 
student its own ' dogmata/ or truths ascertained and agreed upon ; 
nor does any one, in the name of freedom of intellect, persist in 
treating these always as open questions. 

But perhaps if we venture thus to claim the ascertained truths 
of any science as dogmas, the scientific answer will be ready. 
They differ, it will be felt, from the nature of religious dogmas, in 
two important respects. The first difference is, that they are 
offered for acceptance with their full proofs, from the first moment 
that they are offered at all. The student could not, it may be, 
have discovered for himself the law of gravitation, or the circula- 
tion of the blood ; but he can, when these discoveries are once 
set before him by another, see forthwith not only the coherency of 
the principles, but the cogency of their proof. The second differ- 
ence is, that when they have been accepted by the student, proof 
and all, they still claim no allegiance beyond what his intelligence 
cannot but freely give ; he is still free to supersede or upset them, 
if he can. He accepts them indeed provisionally, as identical 
with the truth so far as the truth on the subject is yet known ; yet 
not necessarily as final truth. He accepts them as truths which all 
his further study will comment upon ; presumably indeed in the 
way of continual illustration and corroboration, — so that what he 
accepts for study will be more and more certainly proved by the 
study, — but also, if you please, in the way of correction ; for if 
his study can supersede, or even in any measure correct or alter 
them, why so much the better both for science and for him ! Why 
should not this be equally true of Theology ? Why should religious 
dogmas be received without these conditions, as certainly and 
finally true ? 

To begin with, then, some exception may be taken to the state- 
ment that the student who accepts a scientific doctrine, has the full 
evidence before him from the beginning. That it is not altogether 
so is evident from the simple consideration, just mentioned, that 
his work is a progressive one ; and that the whole course of his 
experience tends, and will tend, to deepen the certainty of his first 
principles. But in so far as the proof of any leading principle is 
being deepened and strengthened by the student's daily work, so 
far it is clear that the amount of certainty about his principles with 
which at first he began, must be less than that with which he ends 
at last ; and therefore that the proof presented to him at the begin- 
ning, however much it may have been adequate to the purpose 
(even though it may have been the completest proof capable of 



vj. The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma. 18 



being presented in the way of exposition from the lip to the ear), 
was nevertheless most incomplete in comparison with the fulness 
of attainable proof. And further, it may certainly be said also, 
that in the convincingness of this evidence as at first presented, 
authority, whether more or less, had an undoubted part. At the 
very least it had a negative place, as a guarantee to the young mind 
rejoicing in the ingenuity of the apparent demonstration, that the 
apparent demonstration was not vitiated by some unseen fallacy, 
or that there was not a series of other considerations behind, which 
would rob the lesson just learnt of its practical usefulness. Often, 
indeed, the degree of authority in the first scientific convictions 
would be very much higher. Often, however helpful the arguments 
or illustrations of a principle may seem, the really overruling con- 
sideration will at first be this, that the whole scientific world has 
absolutely accepted the principle as truth. So much is this the 
case, that if an average student should find himself unable in any 
point to receive the ascertained truths of his science with intelligent 
agreement, he would not hesitate to assume that the whole fault 
lay with himself; he would really be convinced in his soul that the 
dicta of his scientific teachers were right, and that he himself would 
see the certainty of them by and by. 

Now in both these two respects the acceptance of religious 
dogma is not essentially in contrast, but rather is parallel, with 
that of scientific principles. For religious truth is neither in its 
first acceptance a mere matter of blind submission to authority, nor 
is it stagnant and unprogressive after it is accepted. However 
different in other ways the leading truths of the Creed may be from 
scientific principles ; in this respect at least they are not different, 
— that not one of them is ever brought for the acceptance of men 
without some really intelligent evidence and ground for acceptance. 
If any man is asked to accept them, without any intelligent ground 
for the acceptance, we may be bold perhaps to assert that it would 
be his duty to refuse. Of course, however, authority will itself be 
a large part of his intelligent ground ; a larger part or a smaller 
according to circumstances. But then there is no proper antithesis 
between believing in deference to authority, and believing in defer- 
ence to reason, unless it is understood that the authority believed 
in was accepted at first as authority without reason, or maintained 
in spite of the subsequent refusal of reason to give confirmatory 
witness to its assertions. Even in the cases in which there seems 
to be least use of reason, the case of a young child learning at his 
mother's knee, or of a man whose spirit has suffered and been 
broken, and who gives himself up at last to the mere guidance of a 



1 86 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

friend or a teacher, the authority, when accepted at all, is accepted 
on grounds essentially reasonable. The child's reasoning may 
differ in quality from the prodigal's ; but the child trusts father or 
mother on grounds which are wholly, if unconsciously, a product 
of the strictest reason ; and the prodigal has felt in his inmost soul 
alike the deadness of his own spiritual being, and the power and 
the beauty which are in the life of the teacher upon whom he throws 
himself. And this is not the only point ; for the reasonable mind in 
one is not a thing different in nature from the reasonable mind 
in another, or from the eternal reason which is in God. The 
truths, therefore, which we are taught about God, and man, and 
Christ, about sin, and redemption from sin, and the heaven of 
holiness, and which seem to be accepted as a mere act of not 
unreasonable dutifulness, do reasonably withal commend them- 
selves, in some shape or measure, even to the callow mind from its 
earliest immaturity. There is that in the very consciousness of 
child, or of criminal, with which they are in essential harmony. 
That in him with which they are in essential correspondence bears 
witness of them. Nor is any one, in his acceptance of them, wholly 
insensible of this witness to their truth, which is, in fact, engraven 
upon his own conscious being. 

To ' take religion on trust,' then, as it is sometimes derisively 
called, is not really to act in defiance of, or apart from, reason. It 
is an exercise of reason up to a certain point, — just so, and so 
far as, the experience of the person warrants. He sees what to 
trust, and why. He sees where understanding and experience 
which transcend his own would point. And he seeks for the 
rational test of further experience in the only way in which it can 
be had. He defers to the voice of experience, in faith that his 
own experience will by and by prove its truthfulness. On a medical 
question, men would not dispute, they would loudly proclaim, the 
reasonableness and wisdom of such a course. Yet there are those 
who suppose that the truths of religion are to admit of a complete 
preliminary intellectual verification, a verification apart from special 
training and experience, such as they might more reasonably 
expect in any other subject-matter than religion, but such as, in 
fact, they hardly expect elsewhere. 

The doctrines of the Church, then, accepted at first on reason- 
able evidence, which in a greater or less degree, but perhaps never 
wholly, consists in authority reasonably accepted as authority, are 
then in all the experience of spiritual life receiving continual com- 
ment, explanation, corroboration. The whole experience of Chris- 
tian life must be a growth in the apprehension and certainty of 



vi. The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma. 187 

Christian truth. A Christian neophyte may believe every word 
of his Creed, and believe neither ignorantly nor unintelligently. 
But the veteran Christian of fourscore will transcend the child at 
least as much in the degree of certainty with which the doctrines 
of the Church are to his entire faculties, mental, moral, and spirit- 
ual, proved and known to be true, as he can possibly do in his 
merely intellectual apprehension of the history or meaning of the 
words. We may say, indeed, that the life of a professing Chris- 
tian which is not a life of growth in the apprehension of doctrinal 
truth, must necessarily be a retrogression ; just as the life of so- 
called scientific study, which is not continually illuminating afresh, 
and deepening the certainty of its own scientific principles, must 
gradually come to hold even its own scientific principles less and 
less certainly, and to mean by them less and less. 

But even if it may be shown that there is not quite so essential 
a contrast as there seemed to be, between the character of theo- 
logical and scientific dogmas, by reason of the 'proofs which are 
offered, along with his principles, to the student of any science ; 
yet still it will be felt that they differ essentially in the tone and 
manner with which they respectively speak to intellect. The 
truths of the one claim at once to possess an intellectual finality, 
and to command a moral allegiance, which the truths of the other 
do not. 

It may be worth while to say in reply, first of all, that there 
cannot be a real contrast of finality between them, so far as they 
are both really true. What is really true is really true. Neither 
' absolutely,' ' finally,' nor any other adverb in the language will 
make the statement a stronger one. What we call scientific truths 
are not in fact liable to correction, except in so far as they may 
perhaps, after all, not be quite scientific truths, except (that is) in 
respect of such admixture of erroneous supposition, as still has 
clung to them after general acceptance. And on the other hand, 
so far as any mistaken assumptions are mixed up with our appre- 
hension of religious truths, so far these too are liable to receive, 
and in the history of Church doctrine are continually receiving, 
correction. It is, after all, a truism. In either sphere the truths, 
so far as they really are truths, are true absolutely : but are corri- 
gible in so far as our statement of them still contains anything that 
is other than truth. We may put it, perhaps, in another way still. 
If, to assume an impossible hypothesis, any one could really prove, 
not merely that there were some exaggerations or misconceptions 
in the traditional mode of statement of some doctrinal truths, but 
that our really essential Faith was wrong, we may grant hypotheti- 



1 83 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

cally (seeing that truth is supreme) that he would do us all a mighty 
service, at however tremendous a cost. Similarly of course it 
must be owned, that if any one could prove the earth to be flat 
and stationary, and the law of gravitation to be the precise contra- 
dictory of truth, he would do immense service to science. But 
none the less, the scientific certainty on these points is so com- 
plete, that if any one seriously assailed them, it would be felt that 
he could only be dealing with the evidence in a way which tended 
to- compromise the credit of his own reason ; and he would there- 
fore be reasonably held to be, as it is roughly phrased, a fool or a 
madman. And we must claim that for us the certainty of some 
theological propositions is so complete that when any one assails 
them, we are no less reasonable in regarding him with concern, 
rather for his own truth's sake than for the truth of our religion ; 
and that, if miracles or ' an angel from heaven ' should seem to 
bear witness for him, it would still be no bigotry, but in the strict- 
est sense our reasonable course, to refuse the witness, and to treat 
it as merely an attempt to ensnare us into falsehood to the real 
requirements of our reason and conscience. 

Is the conclusion, then, that there is after all no difference at all 
between the truths of Theology and of Science, in respect of their 
claim to authority? On the contrary, there remains a perfectly 
real contrast of authority between them ; only it is to be looked 
for elsewhere than among the conditions upon which our belief in 
them respectively is based. 

There are two distinct senses in which the doctrines of the 
Creed may be said to be authoritative. It may be meant that the 
authoritativeness is in the manner in which they are presented to 
us ; that is to say, that (whatever their content may be) they are 
statements which we believe, and are to believe, on the sole ground 
that we are told to do so, without any appeal to reason of our 
own ; or it may be meant that they are statements whose content 
is of such nature and inherent importance that we cannot, in fact, 
believe them, without thereby necessarily being involved in a train 
of consequential obligations of thought and life. In this latter 
case the authoritativeness lies not in the manner of their presen- 
tation to us or our acceptance of them, but in that which is 
involved in the nature of the truths themselves, if and when they 
are believed. 

Is it true to say of the Creeds that they are ' authoritative ' in the 
former sense? that is to say, that they challenge our allegiance, 
and we are bound to believe them, because we are told that they 
are true, without examination on our part, and without reason? 



VI. The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma. 189 

It has indeed been stated already that, as between pupils and 
teachers, there is in religious learning, as there is in all human 
learning whatever, scientific or otherwise, a certain legitimate and 
important field for authority reasonably accepted as authority, that 
is, the authority of men more learned and experienced than our- 
selves. Even this, of course, means that the pupil believes the 
things taught to be strictly rational to the teacher, though they be 
not so, as yet, to himself. But is it true in speaking of religion, to 
carry this one step further ; and to say that in this sphere our 
whole belief, and duty of belief, rests upon authority as its ultimate 
foundation, the authority, not of mans experience, but of God's 
command? It must, no doubt, be freely owned on all sides that 
if there be a creed commanded of God, we certainly are bound to 
believe it. But is there ? or when, or how, was it commanded ? 
Does any one answer, through our Lord Jesus Christ? or through 
His Church ? or through the Bible ? But who is He ? or what is 
the Bible? or how do we know? To accept doctrines, which we 
otherwise should not accept, because we are told to do so, without 
knowing first who told us, or why we should believe him, is simply 
not a reasonable possibility. But to ask these questions and to 
have answers to them, and believe because we are satisfied in 
some way as to the answers to them, is certainly not to rest the 
act of believing on a foundation of mere authority : essentially 
rather it is, to go over part of the ground of the Creed first, and 
be satisfied as to the correctness of its main substance, and there- 
fore to believe it. A Christian will not deny that the doctrines of 
the Creed are entitled in fact to be held as authoritative, in both of 
the senses distinguished above. But we cannot believe them on 
God's authority till we have first believed in the authority of God. 
And, therefore, their authoritativeness in what w r e have called the 
first sense is not really the ultimate ground of our accepting them : 
for it is not itself accepted and apprehended by us, except as a 
consequence of our first believing that which is the main sub- 
stance of the Creed. It may be the warrant to us of this or that 
detail considered apart; but it is not, and cannot ever be, the 
original and sufficient cause of our believing the whole. Credo 
ut intelligam may be the most true and most reasonable motto 
of the large part of Christian faith and life ; but it is not inconsis- 
tent with — it is founded upon — an ultimate underlying intellexi ut 
crederem. 

There is, then, a real and abiding difference between theological 
and scientific dogmas, in respect of the authority with which 
they speak to us. But the difference is one which does not affect 



190 The Religion of ihe Incarnation, 

at all the method or grounds of our original belief in them respec- 
tively ; it is to be found exclusively in the different subject-matter 
of the two when believed. 

And herein, also, it is that we find the real answer to the other 
form of question, viz., why should Theology claim to be so much 
more final than science ? Much as science has conquered of the 
realm of truth, it does not profess to have conquered more than 
a little. Of the vast residuum it says nothing. It has no idea how- 
small a proportion its present knowledge may bear to that which 
will one day be known. Nay, the further it advances in knowledge 
of truth, so much the smaller a proportion does its realized truth 
seem to it to bear to that which remains unexplored. Why should 
the theologian be less patient of additions to theological knowl- 
edge, such as may some day throw all his present creeds into com- 
parative obscurity? Why should the Christian Creed be fixed 
and inexpansive ? The question is formidable only in an abstract 
form. The reasonable answer to it confronts us the moment we 
consider what is the subject-matter of the Creed. Scientific prin- 
ciples are in their very nature fragments of a truth which is prac- 
tically infinite. But the Christian Creed, if true at all, cannot 
possibly be a fragment of truth. For the Christian Creed does 
not simply enunciate so many abstract principles of natural or 
supernatural life or governance. It introduces us straight to a 
supreme Person, Himself the beginning and end, the author and 
upholder of all. Such a doctrine may be false ; but it can- 
not be a fragment. The child who believes in God, believes in 
everything, though he knows hardly anything. He has infinitely 
more yet to learn, as to what his own belief means. But he has 
nothing to add to it. The perfect knowledge of the universe would 
not add to it, but would only explain it. It is, then, by virtue of 
his personal relation to a Personality which is Itself supreme and 
all inclusive, that he is guilty of no presumption, even though in 
the face of the modest disavowals of scientific men, he must main- 
tain that his own creed is, in its proper nature, even when all 
admissions have been made, rather a complete and conclusive, 
than a partial or a tentative, statement of truth. But this differ- 
ence between him and them is the result neither of any arrogance 
j'n his temper, nor any lack in his logic, but it follows necessarily 
from the nature of the subject-matter of his creed, if and when it 
is believed. 

But still this fact that, if true, they are truths which by the obvious 
necessity of their subject-matter speak to our intellects and con- 
sciences, with a tone of such Divinely commanding authority, 



VI. The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma. 191 

ought not to make me or any one accept them as true, unless the 
evidence for them is adequate. The question is not how authori- 
tative they would be, if true ; nor how important or inclusive they 
would be, if true ; nor is any amount of contingent importance or 
authority adequate evidence for their truth, but only a motive for 
inquiring into its evidence. The question is, Are they true? or 
Are they not true ? and the question is a question of evidence. 

II. And now, in recurring once more to the subject of the 
evidence by which the dogmas of religion are proved, from which 
we diverged just now, we find, in respect of it, a second reality of 
contrast between theological truths and the truths of material 
science. For whilst in both cases equally we depend upon 
evidence, and evidence that is adequate ; it does not follow that 
the evidence for both is in all points similar in kind. In great 
part indeed it is so ; but it is certainly not so altogether. For 
when we speak of the evidence of religious truths, it is to be 
remembered that the full evidence by which our consciences are 
wholly convinced of them, is not of one kind only, but of all kinds. 
The facts of religion address themselves to the whole nature of 
man ; and it is only by the whole nature of man that they can 
ever be fully apprehended. Man is not a being of intellectual 
conceptions or faculties only. And because he is not so, therefore 
no set of principles which could be apprehended by the intellect 
alone (as the theorems of Euclid may appear to be), and which 
make for their acceptance no demand at all upon the qualities of 
his moral or spiritual being, could really present, as religion pro- 
fesses to present, a system of truth and life which would be ade- 
quate to the scope of his whole nature. It is undoubtedly the 
case that just as the truths of religion account for, and appeal to, 
his whole being, so the evidence for them appeals to his whole 
being also. For its complete appreciation there are requirements 
other than intellectual. There must be not only certain endowments 
of mind, but the life of a moral being. There must be moral affec- 
tions, moral perceptions, spiritual affinities and satisfactions. Even 
if the primary conviction of his reason may be apart from these, 
yet of the fully developed evidence, which is the real possession 
of the Christian believer, these are a most important and necessary 
part. Without these, his certainty, adequate though it might be, 
would be far less profound than it is. These are to him essential 
ingredients in the richness and the fulness of the evidence which to 
him is everywhere. Now for this necessary width of the full con- 
firmatory evidence of religion, it is impossible for the religious 
man, with the utmost desire to make every allowance and*apology 



19 2 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

that is possible, to offer any apology at all. So far from being a 
mark of inconsistency or feebleness, it is a necessary note of the 
completeness of religion. Religion professes to have for its sub- 
ject-matter, and in a measure incomplete, but relatively adequate, 
to include, to account for, and to direct, the whole range of all 
man's history, all man's capacities, explored or unexplored, all man's 
destiny now and forever. If its truths and their evidence were 
found to address themselves exclusively to the intellect, in isolation 
from the other qualities and experiences of man's nature, it would 
be self-convicted of inadequacy. If men full of worldliness of 
heart and self-indulgence could be capable of understanding the 
revelation of religious truth as accurately, of embracing it as com- 
pletely, of apprehending the depth and the width of the evidence 
for it (with which all human nature really is saturated) as thoroughly 
as the prayerful and the penitent, this would not mean that religion 
or religious evidence had been lifted up on to a higher and more 
properly scientific level, but rather that it had shrunk down into 
correspondence merely with a part, and not the noblest part, of 
man's present nature. 

It would be far beyond the scope of this paper to discuss kinds 
of evidence, or argue in defence of the position that there is real 
evidence for religious truth, which is none the less properly evi- 
dence, because it is different in kind from the evidence for the 
propositions of material science ; but it may be permissible, at 
least, in passing to record the claim, and to insist that religious 
men, in confining themselves to strictly historical or logical argu- 
ments, are necessarily omitting much which is nevertheless, to 
them, real ground. There are evidences which can speak to the 
heart, the imagination, the conscience, as well as the intelligence. 
Or, perhaps, we shall come nearer to an exact expression of the 
truth, by saying that the intelligence, which can apprehend and 
pronounce upon the evidence of truths of spiritual consciousness, 
is an intelligence identical in name, but not identical in nature, 
with that which can well weigh and judge purely logical — or even 
that which can pronounce upon moral — problems. The intelli- 
gence of a moral character, or of a spiritual personality, differs not 
in range only, but in quality, from that of a merely ' rational ani- 
mal.' If the moral and the spiritual intelligence did not contain 
quite other elements, drawn from quite other experiences and pos- 
sibilities, they could not work upon their higher subject-matter at 
all. To the religious man, therefore, it must seem strictly unrea- 
sonable, in the examination of truths which professedly correspond 
to man's whole nature, and need his whole nature and experience 



VI. The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma. 193 

for the intrepretation of them, to begin by shutting out, as irrele- 
vant, what we will modestly call the half of man's nature ; and to 
demand that the truths shall be so stated and so proved as that 
the statements and proofs shall correspond exclusively with the 
other half, and find in that other half their whole interpretation 
and their whole evidence. 

It may, indeed, be desirable to guard against a misconception, 
by the express admission that there is some necessary ambiguity 
in the terms employed. We may seem to have unduly extended 
both the verbal meaning, and the sphere of importance, of ' evi- 
dence ' and ' proof.' Undoubtedly there is a sense in which it 
would be, not merely true to admit, but important to insist, that 
in the acceptance of religious truth, Faith neither is, nor ever can 
be, displaced, in order that Demonstration may be enthroned in 
her place. But then Demonstration is a word which belongs to 
strictly logical nomenclature. . And the very point here insisted on 
is that the strictly logical presentment of religion is, in reference to 
the real presentment of religion, most inadequate. Undoubtedly, 
if everything else is shorn away, and religion remains solely and 
only in the form of strict logic, without sentiment, without imagin- 
ation, without experience of duty, or sin, or right, or aspiration, or 
anything else which belongs to the spiritual consciousness of 
human personalities, the logic of it is, and must be, imperfectly 
conclusive. 

Now words such as ' evidence,' ' proof,' ' intelligence,' are no 
doubt often used in connection with processes of the intellect 
taken apart — the intellect of a being merely rational. In insisting, 
therefore, that the word ' evidence,' when used in reference to 
religious subject-matter, must include data which, to the observer 
of physical phenomena, would seem vague and impalpable ; and 
that intelligence, as adequately trained to apprehend and give judg- 
ment upon religious evidence, is in some respects other, and more, 
than that intelligence which can deal with evidence into which no 
element of spiritual consciousness enters, — we differ, perhaps, at 
the most, more in form than reality, from those who simply depre- 
cate the appeal to ' evidence ' or ' proof in matters of faith. 

To the religious man, then, the fulness of Christian evidence is 
as many sided as human life. There is historical evidence, — 
itself of at least a dozen different kinds, — literary evidence, met- 
aphysical evidence, moral evidence, evidence of sorrow and joy, 
of goodness and of evil, of sin and of pardon, of despair and of 
hope, of life and of death ; evidence which defies enumerating ; 
into this the whole gradual life of the Christian grows; and there 



194 The Religion of the Incantation. 

is no part nor element of life which does not to him perpetually 
elucidate and confirm the knowledge which has been given him. 
Everything that is or has been, every consciousness, every possi- 
bility, even every doubt or wavering, becomes to the Christian a 
part of the certainty — an element in the absorbing reality — of 
his Creed. 

But this is rather the end than the beginning. Certainly it is 
not thus that the Creed of the Church can present itself to those 
whose life is still independent of the Creed. 

Let us consider, then, how the truths of the Creed did first, in 
fact, introduce themselves to human consciousness. There are 
three several stages of its presentment in history, of which the 
central one is so overmastering in importance that it alone gives 
their character to the other two. They are, first the leading up, 
in the world's history and consciousness, to the life of Jesus 
Christ; secondly, the life and death of Jesus Christ; thirdly, the 
results, in history and consciousness, of the life and death of 
Jesus Christ. We may say, perhaps, that of the first of these the 
main outcome was belief in God ; and such a God, that belief in 
Him carried with it the two corollaries of aspiration a±ter right- 
eousness and conviction of sin. We may say that the third of 
these means the establishment of the Church upon earth, and the 
articulating of her consciousness according to the Creeds. But 
in any case all the three are plainly historical, matters of historical 
inquiry, of historical evidence ; and all plainly depend entirely 
upon the intermediate one, the history of a certain human life 
which purports to be — which either is, or is not — the hinge-point 
of all history whatever. 

All turns, then, upon a certain passage of history. Is the 
history, as believed by Christians, true or false? The Christian 
record of that history is the New Testament. Indeed, of that 
history, the New Testament is the only record. Is, then, the 
history of the teaching and the work, the life and the death, of 
Jesus Christ, presented to us in the New Testament as a chapter 
of historical fact, — is it historical fact, or is it not ? The Incarna- 
tion is either a fact, or a fiction. The Incarnation means also for 
Christians the Atonement. For our present purpose, the Incarna- 
tion may be taken as necessarily including the Atonement. But 
still of this complex fact the dilemma stands. If it is not true, it 
is false. There is no middle term. If it is not true, then, whether 
dogma in itself is, or is not, desirable,, at least all the dogma of the 
Christian Church is false. 



VI. The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma. 195 

The Incarnation and the Atonement together are not presented 
in the New Testament as, by their own mere statement, guarantee- 
ing themselves. On the contrary, there is one single, definite, 
historical fact, which is represented there as the central heart and 
core of the evidence upon which the conviction of their truth 
depends. This fact is the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the 
dead. Though this is not the whole of the Christian Creed, yet 
this, according to St. Paul, is, to the whole of the Christian Creed, 
crucial. ' If there be no resurrection from the dead, then is Christ 
not risen ; and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, 
and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses 
of God ; because we have testified of God, that He raised up 
Christ ; whom He raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. 
For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised ; and if Christ 
be not raised, your faith is vain, ye are yet in your sins.' To be 
direct personal evidence of a certain fact, and that fact the resur- 
rection, — this was, in the view of St. Peter and the Apostles, the 
first qualification, and the central meaning, of Apostleship : ' must 
one be ordained to be a witness with us of His resurrection ; ' 
* this Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses? 
Upon the historical truth or falsehood, then, of the resurrection, 
hangs the whole question of the nature and work of Jesus Christ, 
the whole doctrine of Incarnation and Atonement. 

But in saying this, it is necessary to guard our proper meaning. 
If we admit the fact of the Resurrection to be cardinal, what is 
the fact of the Resurrection which is in question ? It is as far as 
possible from being simply a question whether ' a man ' could or 
could not, did or did not, reappear, after death, in life. When 
we speak of the historical fact, we must mean at least the whole 
fact with all that it was and meant, complex as it was and many 
sided ; not with its meaning or its proof isolated upon a single 
page of the book of history, but having far-reaching affinities, parts 
essentially of its interpretation and of its evidence, entwined in the 
depths of the whole constitution of our nature, and the whole 
drama of history from the first moment to the last. However 
much Christians may have at times to argue about the simple 
evidence for the ' yes ' or ' no ' of the Resurrection of Jesus, as if 
it were the alleged resurrection of any other man that was in 
question, neither the question itself, nor the evidence about it, 
can possibly be, in fact, of the same nature or upon the same 
level, as the evidence about another. No amount of conviction of 
the reappearance in life of any other man, would have any similar 
meaning, or carry any similar consequences. The inherent char- 



ig6 The Religion of the Incarnation, 

acter of Him who rose, and the necessary connection between 
what He was, and had said and claimed for Himself, on the one 
hand, and on the other His rising out of death : this is an essen- 
tial part of that fact of the resurrection, which comes up for proof 
or disproof. The fact that Jesus Christ, being what He was, the 
climax and fulfilment of a thousand converging lines — nay, of all 
the antecedent history of mankind — rose from the dead, and by 
that fact of resurrection (solemnly fore-announced, yet none th< . 
less' totally unlooked for) illuminated and explained for the first 
time all that before had seemed enigmatical or contradictory in 
what He was, -7- and indeed in all humanity; this is the real fact 
of the resurrection which confronts us. It is this vast fact which 
is either true or false. The resurrection of the crucified Jesus 
cannot possibly be a bare or simple fact. When viewed as a 
material manifestation of the moment only, it is at least misunder- 
stood ; it may be unintelligible. It is, no doubt, an event in 
history ; and yet it confronts us, even there in its place and wit- 
ness in history, not simply as a finite historical event, but as an 
eternal counsel and infinite act of God. 

Yet there are times when we must consent to leave much of all 
this, for the moment, on one side. Whatever else the event in his- 
tory may carry with it, of course it must stand its ground as a mere 
historical event. The mere fact may be but a part of it ; yet all will 
be overthrown if the fact be not fact. And so, though the truths 
of the Christian religion, and the evidence for them, be at least as 
wide as was represented above, yet they present themselves to our 
minds still, as they presented themselves at first to the minds of 
men, within the sphere and the rules of ordinary human history and 
historical evidence. Here are events written on the page of his- 
tory. Examine them. Are they historically false or true? If 
they be not false, what do they mean and involve ? This is the 
modest way in which they present themselves. 

No one will now dispute that Jesus died upon the Cross. If He 
did not, on the third day, rise again from that death to life, cad it 
quaestio ; all Christian dogma, all Christian faith, is at an end. 
Something might still be true which might be of interest ; some- 
thing, even, which for sheer want of a better, might be still the 
most interesting fact in the world's long history ; but something 
which from the first line to the last, would be essentially different 
from the Catholic faith. But, on the other hand, if He did so rise 
again, then the fact of His resurrection necessarily raises further 
questions as to His nature and being, — necessarily requires the 
understanding of further truths for its own intelligent explanation. 



vi. The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma. 197 

Now the present paper is not an evidential treatise. It is no part 
of our task to attempt to prove the historical reality of the resur- 
rection. What it does concern us to notice is the way in which 
the determination of all Christian truth hinges upon it. If it falls, 
all the rest will drift away, anchorless and unsubstantial, into the 
region of a merely beautiful dreamland. As dreamland, indeed, it 
may still captivate and inspire ; but anchor of sure fact there will 
be none. It will only be a beautiful imagination, — a false mirage 
reflected from, based upon, falsehood. No doubt imagination is 
sovereign in the lives of men. But then imagination means the 
vivifying of truth, not the spectral embodiment of a lie. 

On the other hand, if the fact of the resurrection stands, then it 
cannot stand alone. If Jesus Christ so lived and taught as even 
the most indefinite believers concede that He lived and taught, if 
He then died on the Cross, and rose again the third day from the 
dead, you have indeed already the foundation dogma of the Creed ; 
and having that, you cannot possibly rest in it : that foundation 
fact will absolutely compel you to ask and to answer certain further 
necessary questions ; and whatever intelligible answer you may 
choose to give to them will be essentially a dogmatic definition. 
Who or what was this man who thus lived, thus spoke, thus died, 
and thus rose from the dead? As a matter of fact, the whole 
Church of Christ in history (including the men who had been His 
own companions, trained and inspired by Himself) taught and 
believed, without shadow of hesitation, that He was very God. 
Very gradually, indeed, had they advanced to this ; step by step, 
through their growing intimacy with a character whose very excel- 
lences were only enigmatical and confounding, so long as the 
master-truth, which lay behind them, was ignored. And very ten- 
tative, on His side, was the method of His self-revelation ; through 
qualities, through inherent powers, through explicit teachings, 
slowly felt, slowly recognized, as transcendent, as impossible, 
except in relation to a truth which, after long misconceptions and 
perplexities, is seen by them at last not only to be true, but to be 
the essential truth which He Himself requires of them. For be 
the method as gradual and as tentative as you please, these wit- 
nesses, who are, in fact, the only witnesses the world ever has had, 
or can have, of His inner life and teaching, testify unhesitatingly 
not only that all true acceptance of Him was, in their judg- 
ment, acceptance of Him as God, but that His life and death 
were penetrated by the consciousness of His own Godhead ; and 
by the deliberate purpose (through whatever unexpected patience 
of method) of convincing the whole world in the end of His 



1 93 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

Godhead, and receiving universal belief, and universal worship as 
God. 

Now no one to-day disputes that He was truly man. Is it true 
that He was very God? It is either true or false. As to the fact 
there are only the two alternatives. And between the two the gulf is 
impassable. If it is not false, it is true. If it is not absolutely 
true, it is absolutely false. According to the faith of the Catholic 
Church it is absolutely true. According to the highest form of 
Arianism, not less than according to the barest Socinianism, it is 
(however you may try to gloss it over) absolutely false. 

Once more, it is quite beyond our province to marshal or press 
argumentatively the proofs that He was indeed God. But it is ne- 
cessary to see with perfect clearness how the question must have 
been raised, and being raised, must have been answered. The 
very life of the Church was belief in Him ; and she could not 
remain fundamentally uncertain as to who or what He was in 
Whom she believed. This was the one thing which had never 
been allowed to those who drew near Christ. All through His 
ministry those who came near Him, and felt the spell of His 
presence, His holiness, His power, were undergoing a training and 
a sifting. Moment by moment, step by step, the accumulating 
evidence of His transcendently perfect humanity kept forcing more 
and more upon them all the question which He would never let 
them escape, the question by which they were to be tested and 
judged : ' What think ye of Christ? ' ' If ye believe not that I am 
He, ye shall die in your sins. ' 

If there is a true historical sense in which the clear definition of 
the doctrine of the Divinity of Jesus Christ must be assigned to 
the Councils of the fourth and fifth centuries, yet it would be a 
great historical blunder to state or imagine, as inference, that till 
then the doctrine was only held partially or with imperfect con- 
sciousness in the Catholic Church. The Church did not, as a 
result of those controversies, develop the consciousness of any new 
doctrine; the development of her consciousness was rather in. 
respect of the shallow but tempting logic which would deform, or 
the delusions which might counterfeit, her doctrine, and of the 
perils to which these must lead. It may be a question, indeed, 
how far the words implicit and explicit do, or do not, represent the 
distinction between the dogmatic consciousness of the Apostolic 
and the Conciliar ages. The difficulty in determining depends 
solely on this, that the words themselves are used with different 
meanings. Thus, sometimes men are said to hold implicitly what 
they never perhaps suspected themselves of holding, if it can be 






vi. The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma. 199 

shown to be a more or less legitimate outcome, or logical develop- 
ment, of their belief. If such men advance inferentially from 
point to point, their explicit belief at a later time may be in many 
particulars materially different from what it had been at an earlier ; 
even though it might be logically shown that the earlier thought 
was, more or less directly, the parent of the later. Now in any 
such sense as this we shall stoutly maintain that, from the begin- 
ning, the Church held dogmatic truths not implicitly, but explicitly 
and positively. They who baptized into the threefold Name of 
the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost ; whose blessing 
was ' The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, 
and the communion of the Holy Ghost ; ' who living in the Spirit, 
lived in Christ ; whose highest worship was the Communion of the 
Body and the Blood of Christ, and whose perfectness of life was 
Christ ; they, so living and worshipping, did not hold the Godhead 
of Jesus Christ implicitly; they did not hold something out of 
which the doctrine of the Trinity might come to be unfolded. On 
the other hand, you may use the same contrast of words, meaning 
merely that you have, through cross-questioning or otherwise, 
obtained a power which you did not possess, of defining, in 
thought and in words, the limits of your belief, and distinguishing 
it precisely from whatever does not belong to it. You hold still 
what you always meant to hold. You say still what you always 
meant to say. But it is your intellectual mastery over your own 
meaning which is altered. Like a person fresh from the encoun- 
ter of a keen cross-examination, you are furnished now, as you 
were not before, with distinctions and comparisons, with definitions 
and measurements, — in a word, with all that intellectual equipment, 
that furniture of alert perception and exact language, by which you 
are able to realize for yourself, as well as to define to others, what 
that meaning exactly is, and what it is not, which itself was before, 
as truly as it is now, the very thing that you meant. 

In this sense, no doubt, the definitions of councils did make 
Christian consciousness more explicit in relation to positive truth. 
They acquired, indeed, no new truth. Primarily they were rather, 
on this side or on that, a blocking off of such false forms of thought 
or avenues of unbalanced inference, as forced themselves forward, 
one by one, amidst the intellectual efforts of the time, to challenge 
the acceptance of Christian people. Primarily they are not the 
Church saying 'yes ' to fresh truths or developments, or forms of 
consciousness ; but rather saying ' no ' to untrue and misleading 
modes of shaping and stating her truth. Only indirectly, in that 
effort, the Church acquires through them a new definiteness of 



200 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

mastery for the intellect in reference to the exactness of her own 
meaning. 

It is comparatively easy for those who are convinced of a truth 
to struggle against its open contradiction. But false modes of stat- 
ing their truth, and unbalanced inferences from their truth, are 
often staggering to minds which would be unperplexed by any less 
insidious form of error. It may be that, in all ages of the Church, 
even those who are born and bred in undoubting faith in the Per- 
son of Jesus, have to pass, more or less explicitly, through their 
owri experience of hesitation and exaggeration, of reaction and 
counter-reaction, before they are quite in a position to define, or 
maintain by argument in the face of insidious alternatives, the 
exact proportion of their own Catholic belief. 

Not unsuggestively, indeed, nor indirectly, do the oscillations of 
the public consciousness in the era of the councils, as to the due 
expression of Catholic belief, reproduce on a larger scale, and 
therefore with more magnified clumsiness, the alternating exagger- 
ations of such a single, struggling mind. The natural thought 
begins, as a matter of course, as Apostles had begun of old, with 
the perfect and obvious certainty that Jesus was a man. Then 
comes the mighty crisis to natural thought. With infinite heavings 
and smugglings, and every conceivable expedient of evasion, it 
strains to avoid the immense conclusion which challenges it, catch- 
ing eagerly at every refinement, if so be it may be possible to stop 
short of full acceptance of a truth so staggering (when it comes to 
be measured intellectually) as that the Man Jesus was Himself the 
Eternal God. Now however grossly unjust it might be to think of 
Arianism as if it ever meant, or held, Jesus Christ to be merely a 
man ; yet it is true that in respect of the one great question which 
is at the root of Christian faith, — is He God, or is He not? — it 
stands as offering alternatives and expedients, by which the plain 
answer ' yes ' may be avoided ; by which therefore the answer 
' no ' is in effect maintained ; for between ' God ' and ' not God ' 
the distinction cannot be bridged. This, then, is the real hinge- 
point of the Catholic faith. But when this, the greatest of all bat- 
tles of belief, is won at last, in spite of every variety of Arian and 
semi-Arian refining ; forthwith the undisciplined mind, always 
ready to exaggerate, always difficult of balance, begins so to run 
into ardor of expression of its truth, as in effect to make unreal the 
other half of the doctrine of the Incarnation. The first great won- 
der once grasped, it is so natural, in fervor of insistence on the 
very Godhead, to forget or deny the simple completeness of the 
very Manhood ! It seems so hard, — almost wanting in reverence, 



vi. The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma. 201 

— still to conceive of Him then as perfectly human, — human body 
and human soul ! What more obvious reaction in the mind of any 
pupil not yet perfectly steadied and balanced? Yet these few 
short sentences represent not untruly the real process of education, 
painfully accomplished by those intellectual struggles which cul- 
minated in the councils of Nicaea and Constantinople, in 325 and 
381 respectively. And when the pupil is steadied from this second 
excess, and the Godhead and the Manhood are both grasped, each 
severally, each completely, there follows again a perfectly natural 
result in a new uncertainty about the union of the two in Jesus. 
Again it seems an instinct of reverence which shrinks from the 
truth. For the Manhood, it is urged, though complete, body, soul, 
and spirit, must yet remain, in Him, a thing separable and separate 
from His own original Divine personality. But if the human nat- 
ure was not verily His own nature, if it was animated by any con- 
sciousness which was not absolutely His own consciousness, the 
consciousness of His one undivided personality, — what or whence 
in Him was this other than His own individual consciousness? Is 
it. so, then, the mind begins necessarily to ask itself, that the mys- 
tery of the Incarnate Life was the mystery of a double conscious- 
ness, a double personality? two distinguishable existences, two 
selves, two identities, side by side, harmonious, allied, yet nowhere 
really meeting in any one underlying principle of unity? It was 
necessary that the doubt should be raised, that its meaning and 
results might be measured. But it is this which becomes the Nes- 
torianism against which the council of Ephesus in 431 set the seal 
of Catholic belief. Once more, the natural reaction from Nestori- 
anism, when the believer is keenly alert against its danger, is so to 
insist upon the indivisible Personal unity, as to shrink from the 
admission of any distinguishableness in Him, actual or possible, 
between the two natures or characters which He united, between the 
human and the Divine elements m His one consciousness. But this 
is either once more to curtail the true completeness of the human 
nature, or to fuse it with the Divine into some new thing not truly 
identical with either. And this is the Monophysitism of 451, the 
subject-matter of the fourth great general council at Chalcedon. 

It is said, indeed, that the ages of councils were uncritical ages ; 
and that their decisions are therefore not to be accepted as author- 
itative on questions of minute theological criticism, for which their 
uncritical spirit made them specially unfit. The assertion is per- 
haps a little beside the mark. You have not to plead that they 
were likely to be uncritical, but to show that they were in fact 
wrong. It is clear that they were not specially unfit either to 



202 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

arrive at a definiteness of meaning, or to express what they meant. 
They were sure what they meant ; and have expressed it with per- 
fect clearness. The question is not how critical they were likely to 
be, but whether their meaning — which is clear — is right or wrong. 
Whatever antecedent probability there may be either in the minds 
of nineteenth-century critics against their correctness, or in the minds 
of Churchmen accustomed to defer to them in favor of it ; it is 
certain that no one who is really doubtful about the truth of Chris- 
tianity, will be called upon to accept it in deference to the mere 
authority of the Councils. However much more they may be to 
ourselves, to such a one as this they must stand at least as witnesses 
of what the consciousness of the Christian community set its seal 
to; in the way of interpretation of its own original deposit of belief. 
We do not much care to argue whether they belonged to an age of 
criticism or not. Yet we must needs be ready to listen to any one 
who can prove that their determinations were wrong. Councils, 
we admit, and Creeds, cannot go behind, but must wholly rest upon 
the history of our Lord Jesus Christ. If any one could seriously 
convict the Creeds of being unscriptural, we must listen to him and 
bow, — as scientific men would have to bow to any one who really 
could prove the fundamental propositions of their science to be 
wrong. But meanwhile, so complete is the historical acceptance of 
the Creeds, and their consecration in the consciousness of the 
Church ; that there is at least as clear a presumption that we are 
uncatholic in differing from them, as there would be that we were 
unscientific if we dissented from the most universally accepted 
faiths of science. 

Now even this, the most commonplace statement of the growth 
of Christian definitions, will serve to mark what the nature of 
dogma is. So far from faith without it being a thing more spiritual 
or pure, faith without it is a thing irrational. Faith in what ? I 
cannot have faith without an object. Faith in Jesus Christ? But 
who is Jesus Christ? Is He a dead man? Is He, as a dead 
man, no longer in any existence? Or am I, at least, necessarily 
ignorant as to whether He and other dead men have any existence, 
actual or probable? Or is He a man indeed, — no more; and 
dead indeed ; but, as other good men, alive after death somehow 
in the blessedness of God ? And what then did His life mean ? or 
His strange deliberate dying? or what connection have they of 
meaning or power with me? And this God that you speak of; 
do I know anything of Him? or what? or how? Or again, is Jesus 
Himself the living God? And are the things true which are 
handed down to me in the Church as taught by Himself about the 



vr. The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma. 203 

relations of God ? Is He my living Master ; my very Redeemer 
by the Cross ; my eternal Judge ? and where and how have I con- 
tact in life or soul with the benefits of His Cross, or the power 
of His help ? If indeed I have nothing to do with Him, and no 
interest in His history, it is possible for me to go on without caring 
to answer such questions. But faith in Him can have no meaning 
while these are ignored. The question whether He is or is not 
God, is one which cannot but be asked and answered. 

And either answer to the question is alike dogmatic. The Arian 
is no less dogmatic than the Catholic. A dogmatic faith is only a 
definite faith ; and that upon questions upon which it has become 
irrational to remain indefinite, after I have once been brought to a 
certain point of acquaintance with them. The question between 
the Catholic and the Arian is, not whose doctrine evades definite- 
ness of determination, but whose dogma is in accord with the 
truth and its evidence. The negative answer to the question pro- 
posed would only be unjudicial, not undogmatic. Meanwhile the 
affirmative answer would be so complete a concession of the whole 
position, that if it has once been made, as much has really been 
admitted, so far as any battle about dogma goes, as if the whole 
formal statement of the Athanasian Creed had been expressly, as 
it will have been implicitly, included. There is nothing, then, 
really to fight against in these words, ' The right faith is, that we 
believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is 
God and Man ; God, of the substance of the Father, begotten be-, 
fore the worlds ; and Man, of the substance of His mother, born in 
the world ; perfect God, and perfect Man : of a reasonable soul and 
human flesh subsisting ; equal to the Father, as touching His God- 
head ; and inferior to the Father, as touching His Manhood. Who 
although He be God and Man : yet He is not two, but one Christ ; 
One; not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh ; but by tak- 
ing of the Manhood into God ; One altogether ; not by confusion 
of substance, but by unity of Person.' 

Another thing which perhaps the same commonplace statement 
may illustrate as to the character of Christian dogma, is its large- 
ness and equity. It is harmony ; it is proportion ; it is the protest 
of balanced completeness against all that partiality, which, by exag- 
gerating something that is true, distorts the proportion and simpli- 
city of truth. Every several form of error — we admit it willingly 
— grew out of, and represented, a truth. Catholic doctrine alone 
preserves the proportion of truth. To work and to think within 
the lines of dogmatic faith, is to work and to think upon the true 
and harmonious conception of the Person of Jesus Christ — ' Quern 



204 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

nosse vivere, Cui servire regnare.' In this knowledge certainly 
there is no limitedness, and in this subordination no slavery. 

The meaning of Christian dogma, then, so far as we have at 
present had anything to do with it, is simply this. It is the self- 
realizing of the consciousness of the Christian community in respect 
of the answer to be given to that one great question, fundamental 
and inevitable, with which all in all times who would approach 
Christ must be met, — ' Whom say ye that lam?' 

But, it will be felt, it is all very well to insist so much upon this 
one point, which it is comparatively easy to represent as the neces- 
sary answer of a truthful conscience to a question which is forced 
upon it by the plainest evidence ; but are there not a great many 
Christian doctrines besides ? What of the rest of them, — < all the 
Articles of the Christian faith,' as the Catechism says? I have ven- 
tured to speak at length upon this one, not because it is easier to 
handle conveniently than the others, but because it directly carries, 
if it does not contain, everything. It is not only that this is in it- 
self so tremendous a dogma, that no one who affirms this can pos- 
sibly quarrel any longer with the principle of dogmatic definition, 
but that this so inevitably involves all the other propositions of the 
Creed, that no one, whose conscience has accepted this, will find 
it easy to separate between it and the whole Christian faith. 

The Christian Creed consists of three parts only ; and all three 
are ' belief in God.' ' I believe in God the Father, the Son, and the 
Holy Ghost ' is, in brief, the whole Christian Creed. Its shortest 
expression is in three words (which three words are but one), 
'Holy, Holy, Holy.' The definitions of the Apostles', of the 
Nicene, and of the Athanasian Creeds, none of them really travel 
outside of this. Take, for example, the doctrine of the Holy Trin- 
ity. Intellectually it is, of course, antecedent to the doctrine of 
the Incarnation and the Atonement. But it will be observed that 
it is made known to us not antecedently, but as a consequence of our 
previous conviction of the Incarnation. Moreover, when it is made 
known it is made known rather incidentally than directly. Even 
though it is, when revealed and apprehended, the inclusive sum of 
our faith, yet there is, in the revelation, no formal unfolding of it, as 
of a mysterious truth set to challenge our express contemplation and 
worship. There is nothing here to be found in the least correspond- 
ing with the explicit challenge, ' Whom say ye that I am ? ' or ' On this 
rock will I build My Church ; ' but rather indirectly, so far as our 
contemplation of the Incarnation, and its abiding consequences, 
requires for its own necessary interpretation to our understanding, 
that we should have some insight into the mystery of the distinction 



vi. The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma, 205 

of Persons in the Godhead, so far, and in reference to that purpose, 
the mystery of the Holy Trinity grows gradually into clearness of 
revelation to our consciousness. It is clear that any distinctness 
of conception whatever as to the meaning of Incarnation would 
be impossible, without some revelation of mutual relations between 
the Sender and the Sent, the Immutable and the Incarnate, the 
Father and the Son. If it is less clear from the first, it is surely 
not less certain, that any conception we may have of the relation so 
revealed between the Father and the Son, would be fainter by far, 
and less intelligible than it is, if it were not for that which our Lord 
Jesus Christ has told us as to the office and nature of the Holy 
Spirit ; if with our growing conception of distinctness and relation 
as between the Sender and the Sent, we had not also some added 
conception of that Blessed Spirit of Holiness, Who, emanating 
from both, is the Spirit of both alike, and is thereby also the very 
bond of perfectness of Love whereby both are united in One ; and 
whereby, further, all spirits in whom God's presence dwells, are 
united, so far, in a real oneness of spirit with one another and with 
God. And it is quite certain, that whether we seem to any one to 
be right or no in treating this revelation of the Holy Ghost as a 
necessary, if incidental, part of what He had need to be taught of 
the revelation of the Father and the Son, in order to make Incar- 
nation properly intelligible ; it is altogether essential for that other 
purpose, in connection with which the revelation is more immedi- 
ately made, that is, for any understanding on our part of the abiding 
work of God in His Church, after the Pvesurrection and Ascension. 
1 The holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, the For- 
giveness of sins, the Resurrection of the body, and the life everlast- 
ing ; ' these are not miscellaneous items thrown in at the end of the 
Creed after the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is finished, but they 
are essential parts of the understanding of the doctrine of the Holy 
Ghost : and on the other hand, without the revelation of the Per- 
son and work of the Holy Ghost, these doctrines, practical though 
they be, and vital for practice, — no less indeed than the very 
essence and meaning of the work of the Incarnation from the 
day of Ascension forwards, that is to say the whole historical effect 
and fruit of the Incarnation, — would be evacuated of all living 
meaning, and would become for us only the empty phrases of a 
far-away baseless yearning, which even now (apart from the life of 
the Holy Spirit informing us) they are ever too ready to become. 

It is hoped that even such brief statements may at least serve 
to indicate how it is true that the whole of our Christian creed, 
even those parts which seem most separable from it, or ante- 



206 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

cedent to it, are for us really contained in the one crucial doc- 
trine of the Incarnation, that is, of the eternal Godhead of the Man 
Christ Jesus. And this will compel us once more to recognize 
the simplicity of Christian dogma. It does not mean a compli- 
cated system of arbitrary definitions upon a great variety of sub- 
jects of religious speculation, formulated one after another by 
human ingenuity, and imposed by human despotism upon the 
consciences of the unthinking or the submissive ; it means rather 
the simple expression (guarded according to experience of mis- 
conception) of the fundamental fact of the Incarnation, together 
with such revelation as to the relations of the Divine Being, and 
the wonder of His work amongst men, as is clearly lit up by the 
event of the Incarnation itself, and is required for such apprehen- 
sion of the meaning and effects of the Incarnation as Jesus Christ 
held to be meet and necessary for us. 

And so it is with all parts of Christian doctrine. If they would 
be found to be necessarily contained in a full unfolding of the 
great truth which the Creed so briefly and simply declares, then 
they really are parts of our faith, because they are really involved 
in the understanding of the threefold revelation to man of the 
Name of God, which is the sum total of our faith. But if the 
Name of our God does not contain them, they are not in our creed 
or our faith. Is there, for example, a visible Church? Is there 
an Apostolic Ministry? The answer depends on the inquiry as to 
what is revealed, first in Scripture, and then in history, as to the 
method of the working of the Spirit of Christ in the world. Did 
the Old Testament prefigure, in action and in utterance, did the 
Incarnation require, did the Gospels interpret or comment upon, 
did the Apostles organize or govern, any definitely articulated 
society, with ceremonies or officers, rules or discipline, of its own? 
Was this the method of association and membership, or was some 
other, the mode of the working of the Spirit of the Christ among 
men? Is the work of Christ, in redeeming and reconciling to 
God, is His present relation to the world, properly intelligible, or 
not, — apart from the Church? Is the ministry of the Church, 
or are the sacraments of the Church, to those who thoughtfully 
read Scripture and history, a demonstrable part or normal con- 
dition of the working of the Holy Ghost in the Church? If so, 
belief in them is contained in my words, not only when I say, ' I 
believe in the holy Catholic Church,' but also, though less plainly, 
when I say, ' I believe in the Holy Ghost.' But if not, it is not 
contained. If they are really separable from the Catholic Church, 
truly understood, or from the understanding of the Holy Spirit 



l 



vi. The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma. 207 

and His work, then they are no part of what any Christian need 
believe. But so far as the holy Catholic Church, so far as the 
orderly, covenanted work of the Holy Spirit in the world, involves 
and contains the idea of the ministry or the sacraments, so far 
every Christian will know, just in proportion as he knows the true 
meaning of his creed, that he is bound to them. It is no part 
of my business to pursue the question of the sacraments or the 
.iinistry further here. 

It may be observed, perhaps, that the Creed contains no propo- 
sition expressly about ourselves, — about the fall, for instance, or 
about sin. Yet in and from the first word of the Creed, I of course 
am present there ; and as to formal propositions about myself, it 
may be that they are not so much articles of belief as rather condi- 
tions of mind antecedent to belief, conditions of self-consciousness 
to which belief fits and responds, and without which the Creed itself 
would be unintelligible. But what is thus necessarily implied and 
involved in the terms of the Creed is, after all, substantially con- 
tained in that Creed to which it is a condition of intelligibleness. 
Of course my creed necessarily presupposes myself. I cannot be- 
lieve at all except I am and have a certain history and faculties. I 
cannot believe in God as Father, as Almighty, as Creator, without 
implying and including within that belief the fundamental facts of 
my nature and relation to Him. I cannot believe in the Incarna- 
tion and the Redemption, their meaning or their consequences, I 
cannot believe in the Holy Spirit, or have any intelligent apprehen- 
sion of His working, except there be implied, as conditions of my 
consciousness necessary to that intelligence, some apprehension of 
that which is meant by the fall, some inalienable sense of evil, 
of sin, of the banishment from God which is the fruit of sin, of 
the inherent contradiction to my nature, the unnatural penalty and 
horror, which the banishment of sin involves. So probation, judg- 
ment, heaven, hell, are beliefs which grow by inevitable conse- 
quence out of the apprehension, once grasped, of the nature and 
distinction of good and evil ; they are necessary corollaries from 
the full perception of the eternal Tightness of right, the eternal 
wrongness of wrong, the eternal separation and contrast between 
right and wrong ; in a word, from belief in God on the part of man. 

Perhaps this illustration may serve to show how much that is not 
obvious in the letter may nevertheless be really contained in man's 
utterance of the Name of God. 

III. But while the doctrines of the Church which her Creeds 
express are thus as simple as they are profound, it is no doubt true 



208 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

that there has grown up round about them a considerable body of 
theological teaching, more or less complicated, which is really of 
the nature of comment upon them, or explication of their nature 
and meaning. When we speak of the dogmas of Christianity it is 
right to distinguish, with the clearest possible line of demarcation, 
between all this mass of explanatory teaching (more or less author- 
itative as it may from time to time appear to be) and the central 
truths themselves, which are our real certainties. The doctrine 
itself is one thing, the theories explicative of the doctrine are 
another. They may be of the highest value in their own time and 
place ; but they are not the immutable principles of Church truth. 
To say this is not really to depreciate the work of theological 
writers and teachers of different ages ; but it is to assign to their 
work its true position. The current mode of explaining a doctrine 
in one age, and bringing it home by illustrations to the imagination 
of men, may be discredited and superseded in another. When 
the current mode of statement or illustration begins to be more or 
less discredited, the minds of quiet people are apt to be distressed. 
This is because very few of us can distinguish between the truths 
themselves which we hold and the (often mistaken) modes of expres- 
sion by which we seem to explain our truths to ourselves. Even 
when our explanation is substantially true, the doctrine is still a dif- 
ferent thing from our explanation of it ; and if any imperfection is 
detected in our explanation of it, it is not truth which suffers ; it 
is only that truth is being distinguished from our imperfect and 
unconscious glosses ; and thereby in the end the truth can only be 
served. Perhaps no illustration of this can be more convincing 
than that which the history of the doctrine of Atonement supplies. 
That Christ died upon the cross for us, that He offered Himself as 
a sacrifice, and that we are redeemed through His blood, this 
is a belief fundamental to Christianity ; nor has the Church ever 
wavered for an instant in her strong faith in this. But when we go 
further, and come to the different illustrations that have been 
given to make the precise nature of Atonement clear to human 
logic, when in fact we enter upon the domain of explicative theo- 
ries, we have not only left the sure ground of the Creeds, and 
embarked upon views which may or may not be correct, but we 
find as a fact that the modes of thought which seemed adequately 
to explain the doctrine to the conscience of some ages have not 
only failed to satisfy, but have actually shocked and offended, 
others. The teaching that God was angry, but that Jesus, as a 
result of gentler mercy, and through His innocent blood, appeased, 
by satisfying, the wrath of the Father, and so reconciled God to 



vi. The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma. 209 

us ; the teaching that Satan had obtained a right over man, but 
that Jesus, by giving up Himself, paid a splendid ransom into the 
hands of Satan ; the teaching that a debt was due from humanity 
to God, and that Jesus, clothed as man, alone could deliver man 
by discharging God's debt. These — be they popular blunder- 
ings or genuine efforts of Theology — may, in their times, have 
both helped and wounded consciences ; but whether they be to us 
as helps or hindrances, it is of the utmost importance that we 
should discriminate them, or others which may have succeeded to 
them as theories explanatory of the Atonement from our cardinal 
belief in the Atonement itself. We may have rightly seen what is 
vicious in these statements, and we may have greatly improved 
upon them, but however much more helpful our modes of exposi- 
tion may prove themselves to our own minds or those of our 
hearers, we may only be repeating the old error, and leading the 
way to fresh distresses in the future, if we confound our mode of 
explanatory comment with the truth of the doctrine itself, and 
claim that the mysterious fact of the Atonement means exactly 
that which is our own best approach to a statement, in illustrative 
words, of what it expresses to us. 

But it may be asked, Are you not saying too much ? Does not 
this seem to mean that the doctrines themselves are little better 
than unintelligible symbols, which need not indeed be changed 
for the simple reason that they can be made to mean whatever is 
necessary to suit the times? No, the truth of them does not 
change ; and even the changeful modes of presenting them are less 
changeful, after all, than they seem. They cannot indefinitely vary ; 
there is one thing which unites them all, and that is the truth itself 
which lies behind them all. The Atonement is a fact, whether I 
can adequately expound it or no. The Atonement is a fact, which 
my attempted expositions do indeed represent, more or less cor- 
rectly, more or less clumsily, even when I seem most to have failed. 
Much as they may seem to differ, and inconsistent as they may appear 
with each other, yet not one of them really represents untruth, but 
truth. Imperfect images they may be, and in respect of their 
imperfections, diverse and distorting ; yet there is not one of the 
theories of Atonement referred to above — not even such as are 
now seen to contain most error — which did not, as seriously held, 
represent and convey some real image of the truth. It may be 
that the truth which they represented was conveyed in an inexact 
way • and that afterwards, when attention was concentrated on the 
points of inexactness, the statement became, and would have 
become, more and more misleading; it was no longer then a 



210 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

possible vehicle of truth ; but what it had really conveyed to those 
to whom it was living, was a real soul-enlightening image of the truth 
of the Atonement. It was an imperfect image ; it was even in part 
a distorted image, — as everything that I see through my window 
is in part distorted. But it was a real image of the real truth none 
the less. 

Local and popular modes of exposition then are often as the 
medium through which dogmatic truth is seen and apprehended, — 
not always, certainly, without distortion. But the more catholic 
the truth, the more it retains its identity of form, however remote 
from each other, in place or time, the diverse types of mind which 
view and teach it, so much the purer must it be from accidental or 
temporary conditionings ; so much the nearer, in rank, to a funda- 
mental doctrine of the Catholic Church. 

We do not, of course, distinguish Catholic dogma from theo- 
logical literature, as though the one were bare facts, and the 
other all explanations of the facts. But we may rightly confine the 
use of the word ' dogma ' to the fundamental facts, together with 
such explanation of them as the Church has agreed, by universal 
instinct, or by dogmatic decree indorsed through ecumenical accep- 
tance, to be essential to a reasonable apprehension of the facts. 

It is the more important to guard with unfaltering clearness this 
distinction between dogma on the one hand, and theological lit- 
erature on the other, because it is, no doubt, in the sphere of 
explanatory theories and expressions that most of those contro- 
versies find their place which distress quiet minds, and rouse hot 
battles of orthodoxy between sincere Christian combatants. If it 
could be recognized at the time how far the apparent innovators of 
successive generations were really questioning, not the doctrines 
themselves, but certain traditional modes of thought and teaching 
which have wrongly adhered to the doctrines, there would be fewer 
accusations of heterodoxy, and less distress and perplexity amongst 
the orthodox. But it is natural enough that this should not be 
perceived by the defenders, when the innovators themselves are so 
often both blind and indifferent to it. And it is just herein that the 
different innovators are apt to make themselves indefensible. Too 
often they think that they are making real advance upon the doc- 
trines of the Church and her Creeds, and they are elated, instead of 
being ashamed, at the thought. They make light of loyalty, they 
despise the birthright of their Churchmanship, and find their own 
self- exaltation in the very consciousness of offending their brethren. 
This, whether done under provocation or no, is to depart from the 
spirit of the Church of Christ, in temper and meaning at least, — 



vi. The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma. 211 

even though their work in the long run should prove (as it must so 
far as there is truth in it) only to serve the interest and work of 
the Church. 

It is easier to see this in retrospect than in struggle. But perhaps 
those who look back upon the struggles of the last generation within 
the Church, will recognize that the orthodox thought of the present 
f.ay has been not a little cleared and served, not merely by the 
Jvork of orthodox defence, but in no small part by the work of the 
' liberalizers ' also. To say this, is by no means necessarily to acquit 
the liberalizers, or to cast a slur upon those who fought against 
them. Such condemnations or acquittals depend upon other con- 
siderations, which do not concern us here. But putting wholly 
aside as irrelevant all condemnation or acquittal of individuals, we 
may yet acknowledge that the work done has in the end served the 
cause of the truth and the Church. This is said, of course, of its 
real intellectual outcome ; certainly not of the unsettling of souls by 
the way. And it is also to be noted that even when the fruit of 
their work has been in a real sense, after all, accepted and incor- 
porated, it is hardly ever in the sense, and never quite with the 
results, which they, so far as they had allowed themselves to be 
malcontents, had supposed. But if whatever is good and true in 
their work becomes, after all, an element in the consciousness of 
the Church, might not the work itself 'have been done, all along, in 
perfect Church loyalty? In so far as different earnest writers of a 
generation ago, or of to-day, are really, whether consciously or not, 
making a contribution to one of the great theological tasks of our 
time, in so far (that is) as they are helping towards the correction 
of erroneous fancies of popular theology, — helping, for instance, 
to modify that superstitious over-statement about ' justification ' 
which would really leave no meaning in * righteousness ; ' or to 
limit the grossness of the theory often represented by the word 
' imputation ; ' or to rebuke the nervous selfishness of religionists 
whose one idea of the meaning of religion was ' to be saved ; ' or 
to qualify the materialism or superstition of ignorant sacramentalists • 
or to banish dogmatic realisms about hell, or explications of atone- 
ment which malign God's Fatherhood ; or the freezing chill and 
paralysis of all life supposed before now to be necessarily involved 
in the Apostolic words ' predestination ' and ' election ; ' so far they 
are really, though it may be from the outside and very indirectly, 
doing the work of the Church. But the pity of it is that the men 
who do this kind of service are so apt to spoil it, by overvaluing 
themselves and forgetting the loveliness and the power of perfect 
subordination to the Church. We may own that Church people 



2 1 2 The Religion of the Incarnation, 

and Church rulers have too often been the stumblingblock. It is 
they who again and again have seemed to fight against everything, 
and by intellectual apathy, and stern moral proscription of every 
form of mental difficulty (wherein oftentimes are the birth-throes 
of enlightenment) to drive living and growing intelligence out of the 
Church, it is true that the greatest of Churchmen would, if the 
badge of their work were submissiveness, have sometimes to wait 
a while, and bear delay, and wrong from inferior minds, with the 
patience of humility. Yes ; but that work of theirs, if it once were 
stamped with this seal of patient submissiveness, would be a glory 
to the Church forever, like the work of her quiet confessors, the 
work of a Scupoli, a Ken, or a Fenelon ; instead of being, as it 
more often seems to be, a great offending and perplexing of 
thousands of the very consciences which deserve to be treated most 
tenderly, and therefore also a wrong and a loss to the conscience 
and character of the writer. 

Are statements like these a concession to the anti-dogmatist ? 
If so, they are one to which, in the name of truth, he is heartily 
welcome. And perhaps under the same high sanction we may 
add what will look, to some minds, like another. We claimed, 
some time since, that the Creed must be, to Christians, rather a 
complete and conclusive than a partial or a tentative statement of 
truth. Yet there is one sense" in which we may own that even the 
definitions of the Creeds may themselves be called relative and 
temporary. For we must not claim for phrases of earthly coinage 
a more than earthly and relative completeness. The Creeds are 
temporary in that they are a complete and sufficient statement of 
truth only for time. And therefore they are only quite perfectly 
adequate to express those truths which have their place in time. 
But we, in respect of truths which transcend time, if we cannot as 
yet be freed from the trammels and limits of earthly thought and 
expression, yet can recognize at least the fact that we are, even in 
our Creeds, still laboring within those trammels. We may have 
ground for believing the Creeds of the Church to be the most per- 
fectly balanced and harmonious expression of the truth whereof 
our earthly knowledge is, or will be, capable. Yet when we strug- 
gle, as in the language of the Athanasian Creed, to express the re- 
lations which have been exhibited to us in the eternal Godhead 
through the use of the words ' Person ' and ' Substance,' or 
vTroo-rao-is and ova-ca ; or when we thus profess our belief in the 
Person of the Holy Ghost, ' The Holy Ghost is of the Father and 
of the Son : neither made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceed- 
ing,' need we fear to own that the instruments which, perforce, we 



vi. The Incantation as the Basis of Do^ma, 213 

make use of upon earth, even in the Creeds of the Church, are 
necessarily imperfect instruments ; the power of conception imper- 
fect ; the power of phrase and imagery imperfect also ; and that 
their sufficiency of truth (though not their correctness meanwhile) 
is so far temporary that it is limited to earth and to time ; and that, 
in the perfect light and knowledge of the presence of God, the per- 
fectest knowledge represented by them will be superseded and ab- 
sorbed, while the glosses and materialisms with which, in various 
ways, we may have been unconsciously clothing them to our own 
imaginations, will be — not superseded only, but corrected, and it 
may be, reproved ? Moreover, if the truths represented in the Creeds 
are wider and deeper than our conceptions of them, we can admit 
that there may possibly be particulars in which, even now, the ex- 
perience of spiritual life may deepen and enlarge the meaning to 
us of our Creeds ; as, for instance, the words heaven and hell may 
present to us ideas differing, in the direction of more correctness, 
from those which they presented to some of our forefathers. It is 
not that the Creeds will be some day corrected. It is not that we 
shall see hereafter how false they were, but how far the best con- 
ceptions which they opened to us, — the best, that is, that our 
earthly faculties were capable of, — lagged in their clumsiness be- 
hind the perfect apprehension of the truths which they had, never- 
theless, not untruly represented ; but which we then shall have 
power to see and know as they are. The truth which is dimly im- 
aged for us in the Creeds will never belie, but will infinitely trans- 
cend, what their words represented on earth. 

But it will very naturally be asked by what right we speak thus of 
the Creeds. In the very moment of admitting, in one sense, their 
incompleteness and want of finality, by what right do we lay down 
still that they are final and complete to the end of time ; that is, 
perhaps, through ages of human advance, of which we may have 
now no conception at all ? Such a question does not apply to the 
strictly historical statements which constitute the foundation of our 
creed, but to those interpretations of historical fact, and to those 
assertions about the Divine Being and its relations, which neces- 
sarily transcend time and experience. And after all, perhaps, the 
answer is not difficult. We have to consider, first, that for the very 
reason that these beliefs do absolutely transcend time and expe- 
rience, therefore no human development w r hich belongs merely to 
time and experience can in itself displace or improve upon them ; 
and secondly, that our knowledge of these truths is really derived 
from a Divine revelation which took place, as we believe, within 
time and experience. We may say, indeed, that the statements of 



2 14 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

this Divine revelation are corroborated to us by such elements of 
thought as our reason (which we believe to be also in its reality 
Divine) is able to supply. It remains, however, that they can only 
really be proved or disproved by arguments which go to prove or 
disprove the truth of the historical Incarnation, and of the revela- 
tions which it contains. 

It follows from hence that we have a valid right to hold them 
not only true, but final in their statement of truth for this present 
world, exactly so far as we have a right to believe that our histori- 
cal revelation is, for time, a final one. Should there, indeed, be 
a wholly fresh revelation, the amount of truth hitherto revealed 
might be superseded ; but nothing short of a revelation can super- 
sede it. The idea that any advance of human reason could be in- 
consistent with it, involves for the Christian who believes human 
reason to be divinely reflected and divinely implanted, nothing less 
than an unthinkable contradiction. We may therefore believe it 
in any case to be final till the coming of a further revelation ; and 
so far as there is anything in the truth already revealed to us, 
which may warrant us in feeling confident that there is no fresh 
revelation in store, within the limits of time, by which the revelation 
of Jesus Christ will be superseded, just so far and no further are 
we justified in claiming for those clauses in the Creed, whose sub- 
ject-matter transcends time and experience, that they are the com- 
pletest expressions of their truths which can be reached in time. 

IV. It may perhaps be a matter of prudence to refer for a 
moment to what are called the ' damnatory clauses ' of the Atha- 
nasian Creed ; though it would not be necessary to do so for the 
purpose of any positive statement or explanation of Christian doc- 
trine. These clauses, however, to the positive statement add a 
negative. It is easy to misunderstand them, and even, by misrep- 
resenting, to make them appear grotesque. But if the question be 
as to what they really mean, they are, after all, to the Christian, an 
obvious and necessary corollary of the Creed which is his life. 
There is but One God, and One Heaven, and One Salvation ; not a 
choice of alternative salvations, or heavens, or gods. There is One 
Incarnation, One Cross, One Divine restoring and exalting of hu- 
manity. There is One Spirit of God, One Church, — the fabric and 
the method of the working of the Spirit, — One Spiritual Covenant 
with man. Man must have part in this One, or he has part in none, 
for there is no other. Man must have knowledge of this One, belief 
in this One ; or there is none for him to believe in or to know. God's 
covenant is with His Church on earth ; and the statements of the 
Creed are the representation in words of that knowledge of the 



vi. The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma. 215 

truth which the Church possesses, the possession of which is her 
life. The Athanasian Creed is not addressed to outsiders, bat 
to those who are within the Church. For encouragement, or (if 
necessary) for warning, it insists to them on the uniqueness of 
their faith. To have hold on God is to have hold on Life. To 
revolt from God is to revolt from Life. This is so, to those who 
have or ought to have learned that it is so, both in fact and in 
thought. Thus, in fact, to drop out of communion with the Incar- 
nation of Christ is to drop out of communion with the inner reali- 
ties and possibilities of humanity. But the mind, and its convictions 
and meanings, cannot wholly be separated from the facts of the life. 
There comes, at least in most lives, a time when the man's own 
allegiance to the facts is a necessary condition of his identification 
with them. ' If ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your 
sins.' There comes a point at which the mind's refusal of the doc- 
trines of religion is the man's revolt from the facts ; and such a 
revolt is repudiation of the. One revelation of God, the One Incar- 
nation, the One Salvation, the One Church or Covenant. This 
must be broadly true, true in the abstract as principle, unless truth 
and falsehood, right and wrong, are fundamentally false distinctions, 
and every man is to be equally good, and equally compelled to 
heaven. At what point any individual person, or class of persons, 
does, or does not, in the sight of the Judge who knows the whole 
inward history and tries the most secret motive, fall within the 
scope of this principle and incur the final condemnation of rebellion 
against the one light and hope of all humanity, is another question 
altogether. Any such application of the principle to the case of in- 
dividuals belongs only to God the Judge, and would be an arrogant 
impiety in any man. Even when such a question may have to 
be determined ecclesiastically, the ecclesiastical condemnation and 
sentence, though expressly representing in shadow the eternal sen- 
tence, is none the less quite distinct, and indeed in its ultimate 
motive even contrasted with it. But however unchristian it may 
be to say that A. or B. will perish everlastingly, the principle 
nevertheless is true, that the truth which the Creed embodies, the 
truth of which Christ's Incarnation is the pivot and centre, is the 
only deliverance from everlasting perishing ; and that whole-hearted 
union and communion with this truth is that true state of Church 
life which alone has the certain seal of the covenant of God. This 
broad truth it is, the necessary complement of any holding of the 
Christian creed as true, which these clauses affirm. If it be said, 
' Your Athanasian Creed is simple and trenchant ; it has no quali- 
fications such as you admit ; ' our reply would be threefold. First, 



2 1 6 The Religio7i of the Incarnation. 

the Creed is part of our heritage from the past, and its phraseology 
is not our handiwork ; but we know that the necessary qualifica- 
tions with which we understand its phraseology have been generally 
recognized by the Church from which we inherit it. Secondly, the 
Quicunque vult is, strictly, not so much a creed as a canticle ; it 
has never been used as a test of Church communion ; and it speaks, 
on a point like this, as the Te Deum would speak, in the language, 
not of judicial award, but of devotional loyalty. Thirdly, the quali- 
fications with which we say that any generalization about man's 
responsibility for belief, whether in this ' canticle ' or in scripture, 
must necessarily be understood, are only such as all men apply to 
any similar generalization about responsibility for conduct. ' If ye 
believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins,' is paralleled by 
' They which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.' 
We claim only to interpret the one as rationally as all men under- 
stand the other. 

It has seemed to be desirable, while insisting upon the claims of 
dogma, not indeed in the name of allegiance to imposed authority, 
but in the name of truth, and on the ground of its simple identity 
with truth, to try to state, with the utmost possible plainness, what- 
ever could be truly admitted in the way of apparent qualification 
of those claims. Truth is supreme and eternal, and dogma, so far 
as it coincides with truth, is, of course, all that truth is. For the 
dogmatic position of the Church and her Creeds, we claim that it 
is the true and simple expression upon earth of the highest truth 
that is, or can be, known. But dogmatic theologians are . not in- 
fallible, and so far as the name of dogma has been claimed for mis- 
taken presumption or misleading statement of truth, so far may 
dogma have seemed to fight against truth. The words, indeed, 
'dogmatic' and ' dogmatism' have acquired a bad reputation. 
But this is not the fault of dogma. A dogmatist, in the invidious 
sense of the word, does not mean one who studies dogma, but 
rather one who foolishly utters what are not dogmas as if they were. 
The dogmatic temper is the temper of one who is imperiously con- 
fident that he is right when he is not. That is to say, the words 
dogma, dogmatic, dogmatize, etc., are commonly used of some- 
thing which is the mere abuse and travesty of their proper mean- 
ing. It is hard that dogma itself should be prejudiced by this 
caricaturing misuse of its name. 

Meanwhile, if real charges be brought against any part of our 
dogmatic creed, we are willing most honestly to examine into 
them. In so far as they are made against current suppositions, 
which are separable from our essential belief, — separable as, for 



vi. The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma. 217 

example, we now see various details of traditional belief about the 
first chapter of Genesis to be separable, — we join our critics in 
the examination with a mind as open as they could desire. And 
it must, in simple candor, be admitted further, that upon the 
appearance of any new form of thought, Churchmen have not 
generally been quick of mind to discriminate the essential from 
the non-essential, so as to receive at first, with any openness of 
mind, what they had afterwards to admit that they might have 
received from the first. But not even this admission must prevent 
us from claiming, that when that to which exception is taken does 
really belong to the essential truths of our Creed, which to us are 
more absolutely established certainties than anything in heaven 
and earth besides, they must pardon us if, while we are still willing 
to give the most candid hearing possible to everything that they 
have to urge, we yet cannot, if we would, divest ourselves of the 
deepest certainties of our existence ; — cannot therefore pretend 
to argue with more openness of mind than would scientific pro- 
fessors — say with a champion who undertook to prove that the 
globe was flat, or that the sun went round the earth. We are 
ready to listen to everything. We are fully prepared to find that 
the champion may produce in evidence some phenomena which 
we shall be unable to account for. We have found it before ; we 
are not unaccustomed to finding it (though, in good time, the per- 
plexity always unravels itself) ; and we shall be in no way discon- 
certed if we find it again. But we cannot pretend meanwhile to 
hold all the truth which our consciences have known in suspense. 
V. What was said just now about the Creeds will not, it is 
hoped, appear to any minds to fail in the entire respect which is 
due to them. Yet it makes it, perhaps, the more incumbent upon 
us to take notice of another form of attack upon dogma, which 
connects itself with an attitude about the Creeds, such as may 
seem at first sight to be not wholly dissimilar ; though presently all 
the foundations of dogma are dissolved by it. But in point of 
fact, if we admit that what the Creeds mean on earth, is less than 
^what the same truths will mean in heaven, or that there may be, 
•ven here, a clumsier, and a completer, understanding of them ; 
this is a position essentially different from maintaining that what 
the Creeds both say and mean, is not only less than, but (if strictly 
taken) inconsistent with, the real truth ; and that not in any trans- 
cendent sense, as celestial beings, with wholly other faculties, 
may conceivably have power of apprehending it in heaven, but as 
the more intelligent among us may, and do, see it now. This is 
not only to admit that the Creeds are built up, perforce, of mate- 



2i8 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

rials which belong to this earth ; but to treat them as mere service- 
able fictions for the teaching of the uncivilized or the young. The 
deliberate unbeliever, indeed, assumes that the Creeds mean what 
they say, and that the Church understands the Creeds. Assuming 
this, he parts company with the Church, because he holds that the 
statements of her Creeds are, in fact, fictitious. But it may surprise 
us to find that there is another form of this view of the fictitious- 
ness of Creeds, and that here the critic speaks, not at all in the 
character of an unbeliever, but rather in that of an enlightened *. 
Churchman. All Christian truth, he says, is true. Even the 
Creeds in a real sense represent the truth. But the Church's 
understanding and expression of Christian truth in the Creeds is 
none the less, strictly, a misrepresentation of the truth. Though 
the truth of Christ lies behind the Church's Creeds, yet they have 
so overlaid, and thereby, in strict speech, misstated it, that it is 
only the patience of criticism, which cutting bravely adrift from 
the authority of traditional interpretation, has succeeded in dis- 
criminating between the Creeds and the meaning of the Creeds, and 
behind what are practically the fictions of dogmatic Christianity, 
has re-discovered the germs of Christian truth. Neither the facts 
of the life of Jesus Christ, nor His teaching, nor His consciousness 
in regard of Himself, were as we have been taught, but were some- 
thing different. He never thought nor taught of Himself as per- 
sonally God, nor did He perform any miracles, nor did He rise 
on the third day from the dead. Whatever scriptures state these 
things explicitly, are proved by that very fact to be glosses or 
errors. And yet, all the while, everything is true spiritually. The 
record of the Incarnate Life is true literally, it may be, at com- 
paratively few points ; certainly not the story of the Birth ; certainly 
not the story of the Resurrection ; certainly not any incident which 
involves, or any expression which implies, miracle. But the Birth, 
the Resurrection, the miracles, every one of them, represent, in 
the most splendid of imaginative language and portraiture, essential 
spiritual truths. They are fictions, but vivid representations, in 
fiction, of fact ; splendid truths, therefore, so long as they are 
understood to be literally fictitious, but perversions of truth, if t 
taken for truth of fact. I* 

It is this conception which was set forth not long ago with a 
singular power and persuasiveness by the author of ' The Kernel 
and the Husk.' The lofty level of thought, the restraint and 
felicity of language, above all the deeply religious spirit of the 
author, invest his arguments with a charm of unusual attractiveness. 
The arguments are not such as it is wholly pleasant to see thus 






VI. The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma. 219 

recommended. He deals in detail, in the course of the volume, 
with much of the narrative of Scripture, with the purpose of show- 
ing how one by one the various records, including of course the 
Birth and Resurrection, have grown to their present form out of 
realities which contained no miracle, and which therefore differed 
essentially from the historical scriptures and faith of the Church. 

It is no part of our task to enter upon such details. Nor is it 
necessary. The struggle against such a theory of Christianity will 
not be fought out on details. It may be conceded that many of 
the miracles, taken singly, can easily be made to fall in with con- 
jectural theories as to a mythical origin, if only the antecedent 
conviction against their reality as miracles be cogent enough really 
to require that the necessary force should be put upon the evi- 
dence. Some indeed may lend themselves to the process with a 
facility which fairly surprises us. Others seem still to be very 
obstinate, and force the rationalizer into strange hypotheses. But 
after all, the real question through one and all, is not how easily 
this or that miracle can be made, by squeezing of evidence, to 
square with a rationalizing hypothesis, but what is the strength of 
the argument for the rationalizing hypothesis itself, which is the 
warrant for squeezing the evidence at all. 

The Evangelists say that Jesus taught in the synagogue at Caper- 
naum. Our author takes for granted that He did so. The Evan- 
gelists say that Jesus miraculously multiplied loaves and fishes in 
the wilderness. Our author takes for granted that He did not so. 
Now why this contrast ? Incidentally, indeed, it may be remarked 
that on the author's own general method, this multiplication of 
loaves ought to be one of the most certain facts in the life of 
Christ, as it is emphasized in every Gospel. But this is by the 
way. The real ground of the contrast in the treatment of the 
same evidence is a certain prior conviction with which the evidence 
is approached. Now we are not contending that any such sifting 
of evidence in the light of prior tests is inadmissible. On the 
contrary, there is hardly any one who does not, on a similar prin- 
ciple, explain the differences (for example) in the accounts of the 
title upon the Cross, or the difficulty as to whether Jesus healed 
one blind man or two, on the way into, or out from Jericho ; but 
we do say that the admissibleness of such a method of interpreting 
absolutely depends upon the certainty of the correctness of the 
prior conviction itself. 

The various details of ingenuity, then, with which he explains 
away particular incidents, are to us of quite subordinate interest. 
Everything depends upon the cogency of the grounds for explain- 



220 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

ing away at all. A large part of the book is occupied in explaining 
away the facts of Christianity, as the Christian Church has hitherto 
understood them, — an explaining away which may be more or less 
necessary, more or less satisfactory, if the premises which require 
it are once admitted, but which certainly is wholly unnecessary, 
and wholly unsatisfactory, if those premises are denied. 

The prior conviction in the book in question is that miracles 
neither do, nor did, happen, in fact, and therefore that any narra- 
tive which involves them is incredible. All the ingenuities of con- 
jecture on individual points become relevant subsequently to, and 
in reliance upon, this underlying principle. Admit this, and they 
are forthwith interesting and valuable. Deny this, and they lose 
their importance at once. It is the pressure of this prior convic- 
tion which seems to give life and force to a number of suggestions, 
about other stories, and particularly about that of the Resurrection, 
which, apart from this animating conviction, would be felt to be 
very lifeless ; and to a total experiment of subjective reconstruc- 
tion, which, but for the strength of the antecedent conviction, 
would have been impossible to men of reverent thought and mod- 
est utterance. The teaching of the book will therefore really be 
accepted or the reverse, precisely according as the minds of its 
readers do, or do not, incline to admit the hypothesis upon which 
it depends. 

It is probable, indeed, that the author would demur to this state- 
ment, at least, when put so simply ; on the ground that, though he 
avows the conviction, yet he has reached the conviction itself by 
no a priori road, but as the result of wide observation and unpreju- 
diced scrutiny of evidence. Now it is not at all meant to be 
asserted that the conviction against miracle is itself reached merely 
by an a priori method. No doubt it has, in fact, been arrived at, 
in those minds which have fully arrived at it, not a priori, but as 
the result of a great induction from experience ; practically, indeed, 
as it seems to them, from experience as good as universal. The 
weight of the evidence in this direction is neither denied nor for- 
gotten. Yet even when it most impresses us, of course it is obvious 
still to reply to ourselves that however powerful this array of expe- 
rience may appear so long as there are no instances to the contrary, 
yet any one contrary instance will break at once the cogency of 
the induction. The case of Jesus Christ is put forward as being 
unique. Its uniqueness is not really qualified by the fact that some 
others, among those nearest to Himself, were by Him enabled — ■ 
avowedly in His power, not their own — to do acts which were 
impossible to other men. This is only a wider extension of His 



vi. The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma. 221 

unique power, not a qualification of it. Against such a case, put 
forward on evidence definite and multiform, and put forward as 
essentially unique, an argument from induction is no argument at 
all. It is a misnomer to call the induction an argument. The 
induction, in fact, is merely an observation that other persons did 
not perform similar miracles ; and that, if Jesus Christ did so, He 
was unique. But this is no answer to the Christian position. It is 
part of the position itself. 

And so the matter must be referred for settlement to the evidence 
that is actually forthcoming about Jesus Christ. But it is plain that 
the inductive presumption against miracle, derived from experience 
of other men, must not come in to warp or rule this evidence. It 
may be present indeed as a sort of cross-examining counsel, as a 
consideration requiring that the evidence should be most minutely 
scrutinized, and suggesting all sorts of questions with a view to this. 
But into the evidence itself, it cannot be permitted to intrude. 

Now, it is part of our complaint against such writers as the 
author of ' The Kernel and the Husk ' that however much their gen- 
eral presumption against miracle may have been inductively and 
patiently reached; yet when they come to deal with the evidence 
about Jesus Christ, this conviction (which ought to stand on one 
side inquiringly) becomes to them an underlying postulate ; it is 
settled beforehand ; it is present with them in their exegesis, not 
simply as a motive for sifting the evidence carefully, but as a touch- 
stone of truth by which it may all be tried. Probably the author 
would believe that he has reached his conviction against the mira- 
cles of Jesus of Nazareth, not merely from a general induction as 
to the absence of miracle in the lives of others, but also from an 
unprejudiced scrutiny of the evidence of the life of Jesus Christ 
Himself. But this is just what we are not at all prepared to con- 
cede. On the contrary, we maintain that his scrutiny is wholly 
prejudiced. Examine the evidence with a bias sufficiently power- 
ful against belief in miracle, and you may end in the result which 
this author reaches. Examine it without such a bias, and you 
will find yourself at every turn protesting against his mode of treat- 
ing the evidence. It is a scrutiny of the evidence on the basis of 
the inadmissibleness of miracles, which gives him that coherent the- 
ory about the growth of the Christian tradition, and those conse- 
quent principles of interpretation of the text of the Gospels, which 
he appears to regard as the simple result of the evidence itself. 

We shall very likely be surprised to find that, after all, the 
abstract impossibility of miracle is not laid down — nay, is ex- 
pressly disclaimed — by him. Miracle (if we rightly understand) 



222 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

is not impossible absolutely, — not even, he adds, d priori improb- 
able ; yet it is equivalent to an impossibility, because the will of the 
Father indwelt wholly in Jesus, and because the perfect uniformity 
of natural processes as we have experienced them, is, in fact, and 
with no exceptions, the will of the Father. 1 No general reflections 
upon our dependence, in ordinary life, on the good faith of a 
uniform nature, ought to blind us to the fact that this last position 
neither has, nor can have, any adequate ground at all. It is sur- 
prising that with so weak a statement of the impossibility of miracle, 
the principle of the impossibility of miracle should have to bear the 
extraordinary weight that is put upon it. Nothing short of a 
demonstration of this impossibility would fully justify the critical 
position that is adopted. For it is, in fact, upon this impossibility 
that the whole re-reading of the history is based. 

It is probably true that if once the hypothesis of the impossibility 
of miracle be accepted as practically certain, an earnest mind, pen- 
etrated with this as its overruling principle, and dwelling upon the 
Gospels always and only in the light of this, will be compelled 
gradually to re-read in one place and re-interpret in another, until 
the whole has been, by steps that upon the hypothesis were irresis- 
tible, metamorphosed into a form as unlike as possible, indeed, to 
what it wore at first, but still one which can be felt to be precious 
and beautiful. But we are entitled to point out how absolutely this 
re-reading of the evidence depends upon the truth of the principle 
which underlies it. For the sake of this, all sorts of violence has to 
be done to what would otherwise be, in one incident after another, 
the obvious meaning of words, the obvious outcome of evidence. 
Without the certainty of this, the new method of reading must be 
critically condemned as baseless and arbitrary. This alone makes 
it rationally possible. Without the strong cogency of this it falls 
instantly to pieces. 

Now, orthodox Christians are sometimes accused of reading their 
historical evidence in the light of a preconception. They begin with 
the doctrine of the Creed, and read all records of fact with the con- 
viction of that doctrine in their hearts and consciences. We need 
not be altogether concerned to combat this statement. Perhaps 
few records are read, or would ever be read intelligently, except in 
the light of the reader's preconceptions. But our point is to see 
clearly that at all events the new reading of the Gospel history is 
itself so entirely the outcome and creature of its antecedent princi- 
ple that it cannot without that hold together for an instant. 

1 See especially the concluding paragraphs of letter xix. 



vi. The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma. 223 

Let us be content, for the moment, to view the orthodox Chris- 
tian and the new rationalist as both alike really reading the Gospel 
narrative in the light of a preconceived principle ; the one view- 
ing everything on the basis of the perfect Divinity of the historical 
Jesus Christ (with the corollary that it is impossible for us to deter- 
mine a priori what power His perfect Humanity — for which we 
have no precedent — would, or would not, naturally and necessa- 
rily exhibit) ; the other viewing everything on the basis of the abso- 
lute impossibility, or at least the incredibleness, of miracle. We 
might point out that the former in his hypothesis has a principle 
which absolutely fits and perfectly accounts for every part of the 
evidence which confronts him ; while the the latter is compelled, 
by the cogency of his principle, to reconstruct for himself almost 
every chapter, of the evidence. And if we go one step farther back 
and ask what is the antecedent reasonableness of the one hypothe- 
sis, or of the other? from what source is each derived? we must 
claim it as simple fact, that the former hypothesis is itself the direct 
outcome of the evidence, — the inevitable outcome, indeed, so long 
as the evidence stands ; while the other is, at bottom, an assump- 
tion, held absolutely in the teeth of the evidence actually existing 
in respect of the life and consciousness of Jesus of Nazareth, and 
itself on other grounds not merely unproved, but essentially inca- 
pable of proof. 1 

But if our hypothesis is itself the outcome of the evidence, and 
fits with perfect exactness into all its intricacies, then we yield far 
too much if we treat it as on the level of a mere preconception. 
To persist in reading the New Testament by the light of the pre- 
conception of the dogma of Christ's Godhead (with the corollary 
that no miracle is incredible as miracle), is to be prejudiced only 
in the same sense in which the scientist is prejudiced who persists 
in studying the records of astronomy in the light of certain precon- 
ceptions as to the parabola or the law of gravitation. 

But what is the case with the other hypothesis? By it the 
historical Jesus Christ is swept away; and another personality, 
which does not exist in the history at all, but which the history has 
suggested to certain earnest-minded critics of our own day, is 
substituted in His place. All those who witnessed of His words 
and deeds to the Church, all those whose witness the Church has 
accepted and sealed, are thoroughly mistaken, mistaken in the 

^ * l The question of miracles seems now to be admitted on all hands to he 
simply a question of evidence.' These are the words as much of Professor 
Huxlev as of the Duke of Argyll. Nineteenth Century, April, 1887, p. 483; 
cp. February, 1887, pp. 201, etc. 



224 The Religion of tJie Incarnation. 

very points which to them were fundamental. However honest 
they may have been in their superstitious ignorance, they certainly 
bore to the world what was, in fact, false testimony. It is impres- 
sive, with a strange impressiveness, to follow this hypothesis 
through the story of Christ's life ; and see with what ingenuity, 
often plausible, often pathetic, the old facts are refashioned to 
meet the new principle. 

Cardinal, of course, in difficulty as in importance, is the narra- 
tive of the Resurrection ; that plain statement of fact, to testify 
whereto was the primary qualification, and primary function, of 
Apostleship ; and which, from St. Peter and St. Paul downwards, 
has always been recognized as cardinal to the faith of the Church. 

Now given, first, the certain conviction that no miracle oc- 
curred ; and secondly, a working hypothesis as to the growth of 
the Christian Scriptures, which not only enables, but requires, you 
to set aside, on grounds of subjective criticism, all such evidence 
as seems to you to be improbable ; and it follows that, if you are 
still of a very religious mind, you will probably have to take refuge 
in what may yet be to you the beautiful story of a Resurrection 
exclusively spiritual. 

You must, of course, deal very violently with the direct evi- 
dence. But that is already covered by the general theory you 
have reached as to the historical genesis and value (or lack of 
value) of the books of the New Testament. And, of course, in 
adopting such a view of the books of the New Testament, you are 
reducing to a phantasm the reality of your belief in the Holy 
Catholic Church, which has enshrined and consecrated, as per- 
fectest truth, what are really at best only fables, — capable, indeed, 
of clumsily representing the truth to the childish or the stupid, 
but beginning to be absolutely pernicious to minds which have 
reached a certain point of intelligent education. 

Tolerating these things, however, you may admit the truth of 
.he Resurrection (as you may admit every proposition of the 
Creed) in words ; only in a sense so refined, so exclusively spirit- 
ual, that no bodily reality of resurrection is left. There, is no 
resurrection in your creed correlative to the dying. There is no 
resurrection more, or more demonstrable, than what we believe to 
be true of men in general. There is no resurrection which enters 
within the ordinary sphere of human history, or admits any direct 
contact with the normal methods of human evidence or human 
proof. The question raised is not whether current imaginations of 
the Resurrection may possibly be more or less exaggerated in the 
way of materialism, but whether there was any corporeal reality 






VI. The Iucarnat'.cn as the Basis of Dogma. 225 

of resurrection at all. And the question is settled in the negative. 
The foundation fact of the Creed is etherealized away ; and all the 
rest, with it, becomes together impalpable and subjective. 

We do not say that there is not a large element which is true, 
in the thought of such a writer as we have been considering. 
Where the mind is so devoutly in earnest, it is no hard task to 
believe that it too must be animated originally by truth. We need 
not say, therefore, that the work of this earnestness may not serve 
us all, and contribute to the thought of us all. It may well be 
true that in our bald understanding of the doctrine of the Resur- 
rection, — or indeed of the whole Incarnation, from beginning to 
end, — we have, many of us, too little imagined the scope and 
depth of its spiritual import. If our orthodoxy has been so well con- 
tent with insisting mechanically upon the literal fact, as not only to 
forget, but to disdain or disown in any measure, the vast spiritual 
realities which it ought to express to us ; then our stupidity, or 
narrowness, in orthodoxy, is in part to blame, for the distaste 
which they have created towards orthodoxy in some natures more 
sensitive than our own. In so far as they can, in this respect, 
return good for evil, we will not be slow to acknowledge our debt 
to them. We will be grateful for any new suggestion they can 
discover, as to the moral beauty or import of the Resurrection, or 
of the Incarnation, or of any or every other miracle, considered 
upon its moral side as allegory. Some ways at least there may be, 
in which their insistence may tend to deepen for us our under- 
standing of truths, whose more spiritual aspects we had dwelt 
upon perhaps, in some cases, — perhaps had even imagined, — 
far too little. But doubtless that true element of their work, which 
the mind of the Catholic Church will assimilate, will be greatly 
modified from the form in which it now presents itself — to them 
as to others. It will, to say the least, be positive rather than 
negative ; stimulating spiritual sensibilities, but not by explaining 
away the facts of the body ; widening (it may be) our insight into 
the divineness of history, and the depth of the meaning of certain 
events which happened in it, — but not shattering both it and 
them, by dissolving their historical truth. 

Meanwhile of the one-sided aspect we can but say that no 
doubt transcendental spiritualism has a great attractiveness. The 
Magian aspiration always was fascinating. Individuals, indeed, of 
enthusiastic sympathies, trained themselves in dogmatic truth, and 
indulging their freest speculations always on a background of 
inveterate dogmatic instinct, may fancy the ' spiritualized Chris- 
tianity ' to be in itself a stable and a living completeness ; but as 

15 



226 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

a system, it will neither produce life nor perpetuate it. It is an 
attempt to improve upon the Church of Christ, upon the condi- 
tions of human nature, upon the facts of history. The Church 
of Christ is not so. The Church of Christ does not ignore the 
fundamental conditions of human experience. The Church of 
Christ is balanced, harmonious, all-embracing, all-adjusting. The 
Incarnation was the sanctifying of both parts of human nature, 
not the abolition of either. The Church, the Sacraments, human 
nature, Jesus Christ Himself, all are twofold ; all are earthly objec- 
tive, as well as transcendental spiritual. And so long as this world 
is real as well as the next ; so long as man is body as well as soul ; 
so long all attempts to evaporate the body and its realities are 
foredoomed to a necessary and a salutary failure. The religion, 
which attempts to be rid of the bodily side of things spiritual, 
sooner or later loses hold of all reality. Pure spiritualism, however 
noble the aspiration, however living the energy with which it starts, 
always has ended at last, and will always end, in evanescence. 



VII. 

THE ATONEMENT. 



/ 

ARTHUR LYTTELTON. 



VII. 

THE ATONEMENT. 



I. Theological doctrine, describing, as it professes to do, the 
dealings of an all-wise Person with the human race, must be a 
consistent whole, each part of which reflects the oneness of the 
will on which it is based. What we call particular doctrines are in 
reality only various applications to various human conditions of 
one great uniform method of Divine government, which is the 
expression in human affairs of one Divine will. The theological 
statement of any part of this method ought to bear on its face the 
marks of the whole from which it is temporarily separated ; for 
though it may be necessary to make now this, now that doctrine 
prominent, to isolate it and lay stress on it, this should be done 
in such a way that in each special truth the whole should, in a 
manner, be contained. We must be able to trace out in each the 
lines of the Divine action which is only fully displayed in the 
whole. Neglect of this not only makes our faith as a whole weak 
and incoherent, but deprives the doctrines themselves of the illu- 
mination and strength which are afforded by the discovery in them 
of mutual likeness and harmony. They become first -unintelligible 
and then inconceivable, and the revelation of the character of God, 
which should be perceived in every part of His dealings with men, 
becomes confused and dim to us. This has been especially the 
case with the Atonement. In the course of religious controversy 
this doctrine has become separated from the rest, at one time 
neglected, at another over-emphasized, till in its isolation it has 
been so stated as to be almost incredible. Men could not indeed 
be brought to disbelieve in forgiveness, however attained, and the 
conviction of remission of sins through and in the Blood of Christ 
has survived all the theories which have been framed to account 
for it ; but nevertheless, the unreality of these theories has been a 
disaster to the Christian faith. Some of them have strained our 
belief in the moral attributes of God, others have given men easy 
thoughts of sin and its consequences. This has been so because 



230 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

they have treated the Atonement apart from the whole body of 
facts which make up the Christian conception of God and His 
dealings with men. In this essay the attempt will be made to pre- 
sent the doctrine in its relation to the other great Christian truths ; 
to the doctrines, that is, of God, of the Incarnation, of sin. 

(1) On the human side the fact with which we have to deal is 
the fact of sin. Of this conception the Bible, the most complete 
record of the religious history of man, is full from the first page to 
the last. Throughout the whole course of Jewish development, 
the idea that man has offended the justice of God was one of the 
abiding elements in the religious consciousness of the race. But 
it was by no means confined to the Jews. They have been truly 
called the conservators of the idea of sin ; but it has never been 
permanently absent, in some form or other, from the human mind, 
although we learn most about it, and can see it in its clearest, most 
intense form, in the Hebrew religion. Now this conception of sin 
in its effect on the human soul is of a twofold character. Sin is 
felt to be alienation from God, Who is the source of life, and 
strength, and peace, and in consequence of that alienation the 
whole nature is weakened and corrupted. In this aspect sin is 
a state in which the will is separated from the Divine will, the life 
is cut off from the life of God which He designed us to share. 
When men come to realize what is meant by union with God, and 
to feel the awful consequences of separation, there arises at once 
the longing for a return, a reconciliation ; but this longing has by 
itself no power to effect so great a change. To pass from aliena- 
tion to union is to pass from darkness to light, from evil to good, 
and can only be accomplished by that very power, the power of a 
life united to God, which has been forfeited by sin. Only in 
union with God can man accomplish anything that is good ; and, 
therefore, so long as he is alienated from God, he can only long 
for, he cannot obtain, his reunion with the Divine life. Sin there- 
fore, thus considered, is not only wickedness ; it is also misery and 
hopelessness. Sinners are ' without God in the world/ and for 
that reason they ' have no hope.' 

This is the aspect of sin as a state of the sinful soul, and as 
affecting the present relation between man and God. It has 
destroyed the union, has broken down even the sacrificial bridge, 
for it has made all acceptable offerings impossible. Man's will is 
weakened, therefore he has not strength to offer himself completely 
and unreservedly to God ; his nature is corrupted and stained, 
therefore his offering, could he make it, could not be accepted. 
Sin is a hopeless state of weakness and uncleanness. But there is 



vii. The Atonement. 231 

another, in one sense an earlier, more fundamental aspect of sin. 
The sins of the past have produced not merely weakness and cor- 
ruption, but also guilt. The sinner feels himself guilty before God. 
If we examine the idea of guilt, as realized by the conscience, it 
will be seen to contain the belief in an external power, or law, or 
person against whom the offence has been committed, and also an 
internal feeling, the acknowledgment of ill-desert, a sense of being 
under sentence, and that justly. Whether the punishment which 
is felt to be the due reward of the offence has been borne or not, 
the conception of punishment, when the offence has been com- 
mitted, cannot be avoided, and it brings with it a conviction of its 
justice. These two elements, the external and the internal element, 
seem to be necessary to the full conception of guilt. The com- 
mon fallacy that a self-indulgent sinner is no one's enemy but his 
own would, were it true, involve the further inference that such a 
sinner would not feel himself guilty. But it is precisely because 
the consciousness of sin does not and cannot stop here that, over 
and above any injury to self, any weakness or even corruption pro- 
duced by sin, we speak of its guilt. ' Against Thee, Thee only, 
have I sinned, and done that which is evil in Thy sight.' This 
belief in an external power, whose condemnation has been incurred 
by sin, may take various forms ; for the power may be represented 
as impersonal or as personal, as law or as God. For our present 
purposes, however, the distinction is immaterial ; the essential 
point is that it is something external to ourselves, not merely the 
echo of the sinner's own self-inflicted pain and injury. We cannot, 
however, limit it to this. For it is not merely an external power, 
it is also a just power that is presented to the sense of guilt. 
Before bare power, unrighteous or non-moral, an offender may be 
compelled to submit, but he will not feel guilt. The state of mind 
expressed by Mill's well-known defiance is his who has offended a 
superior power which he cannot believe to be just, and it is very 
far removed from the feeling of guiltiness. 1 The sense of guilt 
implies the righteousness as well as the power of that against which 
we have offended ; it is a moral conviction. Guiltiness, then, 
regarded in one aspect is the sense of sin, in another it is the 
recognition of the law of righteousness, or, if we may now assume 
the religious point of view, it is the conviction of the wrath of 
God against sin. 

1 Mill, Examination of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy, p. 103: 'I will 
call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my 
fellow-creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so 
calling him, to hell I will go.' 






232 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

It is plain, if we will only scrutinize closely and candidly the 
conception of sin and guilt, that no merely ' subjective ' explana- 
tion will account for the facts revealed by our consciousness. 
Even if we had no scriptural evidence to guide us, the evidence, 
that is, to take it at the lowest, of a series of specially qualified 
witnesses to religious phenomena, our own hearts would tell us of 
the wrath of God against sin. It is irresistibly felt that there is a 
Power hostile to sin, and that this Power has decreed a righteous 
punishment for the offences which are the external signs and 
results of the sinful state. Whatever the punishment may be, a 
question we need not now discuss, the sinner's conscience warns 
him of it. He may apparently, or for a time, escape it ; but it is 
none the less felt to be the fitting expression of Divine wrath, the 
righteous manifestation of the hostility of God's nature to sin and 
all its consequences. Guilt, then, like sin, has its twofold charac- 
ter. It is the belief in an external hostility to sin expressing itself 
in punishment, and also the conviction that such punishment is 
righteous and just. Thus, when once God is recognized as the 
offended Person, the acknowledgment of the righteousness of His 
judgment follows. ' Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and 
done that which is evil in Thy sight ; that Thou mightest be justified 
when Thou speakest, and be clear when Thou judgest.' 

(2) Corresponding to the sense of sin in its twofold aspect we 
find, not only in the Mosaic system or in the scriptural history, 
but almost universally established, the system of sacrifice. It is 
not necessary to maintain that sacrifice, in its essential idea, was 
intended to express the consciousness of sin. Rather, it seems to 
be, essentially, the expression of the very opposite of sin, of that 
relation of man to God which sin destroyed. 1 It is sometimes 
said that sacrifice is the recognition of God's sovereignty, the tribute 
paid by His subjects. This is, of course, a necessary element in 
the conception of sacrifice, for God is our King ; but it does not 
satisfy the whole consciousness which man has of his original rela- 
tion to God. That is a relation, not of subjection only, but of 
union at least as close as that of sons to a Father, a union whereby 
we derive life from His life, and render back absolute unquestion- 
ing love to Him. Sacrifice is, in its highest, original meaning, the 
outward expression of this love. As human love naturally takes 
outward form in gifts, and the closer, the more fervent it is, makes 
those gifts more and more personal, till at last it wholly gives 
itself; so sacrifice should be the recognition of our union with 

1 Cf. Holland, Logic and Life, pp. 107, 108. 



vii. The Atonement. 233 

God, an expression of our love for Him, giving Him all that we 
have and all that we are. Submission, reverence, love, are the 
original feelings which sacrifice was intended to represent ; and it 
may be called, therefore, the expression of man's relations to God 
in their purest form, unmarred and unbroken by sin. But this is 
only the original, ideal meaning, for with the intrusion of sin 
another element appears in sacrifice ; and men attempt, by their 
offerings, to expiate their offences, to cover their sins, to wipe 
out their guilt, to propitiate Divine wrath. But though this new 
element is introduced, the original intention is not altogether lost. 
The union has been destroyed by sin, but even in the sin-offerings 
under the Law there was expressed the endeavor to regain it, to 
enter once more into living relations with God : while the normal 
sacrifices, of the congregation went beyond this, and represented 
the exercise of a right based on union with God, the presentation 
of the people before Him. Thus we must recognize in the Mo- 
saic sacrifices — the most complete and typical form of the sacri- 
ficial idea — the twofold aspect which corresponds to the twofold 
effect of sin on the human race. There is the offering, sometimes 
the bloodless offering, by which was typified simply man's depend- 
ence on God, his submission to Him, his life derived from Him 
and therefore rendered back to Him. From this point of view 
the sacrifice culminated, not in the slaying and offering of the 
victim, but in the sprinkling of the blood, the i principle of life,' 
upon the altar. The priestly mediators brought the blood, which 
1 maketh atonement by reason of the life,' before God, and sprin- 
kled it upon the altar, in order that the lost union with God in the 
covenant might be restored, and life once more derived from God 
as it had been offered to Him. The whole system was indeed 
only partial, temporary, external. The Mosaic sacrifices ' sancti- 
fied unto the cleanness of the flesh,' they did not 'cleanse the 
conscience from dead works to serve the living God.' So the res- 
toration which the special sin-offerings accomplished was merely 
external and temporary, the reunion of the offender with the con- 
gregation of Israel from which his fault had separated him. But 
as this excommunication symbolized the loss, brought about by 
sin, of life with God, so the reunion with the congregation typi- 
fied the reunion of the sinner with God. As a system, then, 
the Mosaic sacrifices both corresponded to a deep desire of the 
human heart, the desire to recover the lost relation to the Divine 
life, and also by their imperfection pointed forward to a time 
when, by means of a more perfect offering, that restoration should 
be complete, accomplished once for all, and eternal. This is one 



234 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

aspect of the sacrificial system. But before this typical restoration 
of life, there came the mysterious act which corresponded to the 
sense of guilt. Leaving aside the lesser offerings of the show- 
bread and the incense, it may be said generally that in every 
sacrifice the slaying of a victim was a necessary element. And 
there is deep significance in the manner in which the slaying was 
performed. The hands of the offerer laid upon the victim's head 
denoted, according to the unvarying use of the Old Testament, 
the representative character of the animal offered, and thus the 
victim was, so to speak, laden with the guilt of him who sought 
for pardon and reconciliation. The victim was then slain by the 
offerer himself, and the death thus became an acknowledgment of 
the justice of God's punishments for sin : it was as if the offerer 
declared, ' This representative of my guilt I here, by my own act, 
doom to death, in satisfaction of the righteous law of vengeance 
against sin, for " the soul that sinneth it shall die." ' It was not, 
therefore, till the sense of personal guilt had been expressed by 
the act which constituted the victim a representative of the offerer, 
and by the slaying which typified the need of expiation by suffer- 
ing for sin, that the sacrifice was fit to be presented before God by 
the mediation of the priest, and the blood, ' the life which had 
willingly passed through death,' 1 could be sprinkled as a token of 
restored life in God. A careful study of the Mosaic sacrifices will 
show the twofold character impressed upon them. Both aspects 
are necessary, they may even be described as two sides of the 
same fact. Before God can be approached by a sinner he must 
expiate his sin by suffering, must perfectly satisfy the demands of 
the law, must atone for the past which has loaded him with guilt : 
and then, as part of the same series of acts, the life so sacrificed, 
so purified by the expiatory death, is accepted by God, and being 
restored from Him, becomes the symbol and the means of union 
with Him. Forgiveness for the past, cleansing in the present, hope 
for the future, are thus united in one great symbolic ceremony. 

The Mosaic system was only external, ' sanctifying unto the 
cleanness of the flesh ; ' partial, for it provided no expiation for 
the graver moral transgressions ; temporary, for the sacrifices had 
to be repeated ' day by day ; ' provisional, for, ' if there was per- 
fection through the Levitical priesthood, „ . . what further need 
was there that another priest should arise after the order of Mel- 
chizedek ? ' In spite, however, of these obvious defects and limi- 
tations in the Mosaic system, there was a constant tendency among 

1 Milligan, The Resurrection, p. 278. 



vii. The Atonement. 235 

the Jews to rest content with it, to rely upon the efficacy of these 
external sacrifices and ceremonies for their whole religion, to 
believe that ' the blood of bulls and goats ' could 'put away sin,' 
and that no inner spiritual repentance or renovation was required. 
And the highest minds of the nation, represented by the prophets, 
were keenly alive to this danger : their rebukes and remonstrances 
show how strongly they felt the imperfection of the sacrificial sys- 
tem, how it failed to satisfy the really religious cravings of spiritual 
minds. Yet there it was, divinely ordained, clearly necessary as 
the expression of the national religious life, profoundly signifi- 
cant. It could not be dispensed with, yet it could not satisfy : in 
its incompleteness, as well as in its symbolism, it pointed forward, 
and foreshadowed a perfect expiation. 

(3) This examination of the sacrificial system of the Old Tes- 
tament is necessary in a discussion of the doctrine of the Atone- 
ment, for several reasons. The institutions of the Law were, in 
the first place, ordained by God, and therefore intended to reveal 
in some degree His purposes, His mind towards man. We thus 
find in them traces of the fuller revelation which came afterwards, 
and the two dispensations throw light on each other. Then again, 
it was from the Law that the Jews derived their religious language : 
their conceptions of sacrifice, of atonement, of the effects of sin, 
were moulded by the influence of the Mosaic ceremonies. For 
this reason the Apostolic doctrine of the Atonement must be looked 
at in connection with the ideas inspired by the Law, although, of 
course, the life and work of our Lord so enlarged the religious 
conceptions of the Apostles as to constitute a fresh revelation. 
But it was a revelation on the lines, so to speak, of the old ; it 
took up and continued the ideas implanted by the Mosaic reli- 
gion, and displayed the fulfilment of the earlier promises and fore- 
casts. It is, therefore, from the Old Testament that we have to 
learn the vocabulary of the Apostolic writings. As the Messianic 
hopes and phraseology throw light upon the Apostolic conception 
of the Kingdom of Christ, so the sacrificial ceremonies and lan- 
guage of the Law throw light upon the Apostolic conception of 
the Sacrifice, the Atonement of Christ. But this is not all. The 
Mosaic institutions, in their general outlines, were no arbitrary 
and artificial symbols, but corresponded to religious feelings, needs, 
aspirations that may truly be called natural and universal. This 
conception of sin in its twofold aspect of alienation and of guilt, 
and this idea of sacrifice as effecting man's restoration to union 
with God, and also as expiating his guilt by suffering, correspond 
to what the human conscience, when deeply and sincerely inves- 






236 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

tigated, declares to be its inmost secret. Every man who has 
once realized sin, can also realize the feelings of the Jew who 
longed to make an expiation for the guilt of the past, to suffer 
some loss, some penalty that would cover his sin, and who there- 
fore brought his offering before God, made the unconscious victim 
his representative, the bearer of his guilt, and by slaying it strove 
to make atonement. We feel the same need, the same longing. 
This load of guilt has to be laid down somehow : this past sinful- 
ness, must meet with a punishment which will make expiation for 
it : before this lost union with God can be restored we must be 
assured of pardon, must know that the wrath of God no longer 
abides on us, but has been turned away, and finds no longer in 
us the sin which is the one obstacle to the free course of Divine 
love. And then we know further that bitter truth which came to 
the loftiest minds among the Jews, that no sacrifice of ours can 
have atoning value, for God demands the offering of ourselves, 
and we are so weakened by sin that we cannot give ourselves up 
to Him, so polluted by sin that the sacrifice is worthless in His 
eyes. In order to atone, sacrifice must be no outward ceremony, 
the offering of this or that possession, the fulfilment of this or that 
externally imposed ordinance, but the entire surrender of self to 
God, and to His law, a surrender dictated from within by the free 
impulse of the will. Therefore, just as the spiritually minded Jew 
felt the continual discrepancy between the external ceremonies 
which he was bound to fulfil, and the complete submission to the 
will of God which they could not effect, and without which they 
were wholly inadequate, so every awakened conscience must feel 
the fruitlessness of any outward expression of devotion and obedi- 
ence so long as there is no complete sacrifice of self. 

These, then, seem to be the conditions which must be satisfied 
before an atonement can meet the needs of the human heart and 
conscience, whether these are inferred from an examination of the 
Hebrew religious institutions or are gathered from our own 
knowledge of ourselves and of others. There is, first of all, the 
consciousness of guilt, of an offended God, of a law transgressed, 
of punishment impending, to expiate which some sacrifice is neces- 
sary, but no sacrifice adequate to which can be offered by us as we 
are. Propitiation is the first demand of the law, and we cannot, 
of ourselves, propitiate Him whose anger we have righteously 
incurred. Secondly, we long for an abiding union with Him, and 
for the full bestowal of the Divine life which results from that union 
alone. Propitiation is not enough by itself, though propitiation is 
the necessary first step in the process of reconciliation. Aliens by 



vii. The Atonement. 237 

our own sinful acts, and by the sin of our forefathers, from the life 
of God, we yet long to return and to live once more in Him. But 
this is equally impossible for us to accomplish of ourselves. By- 
sin we have exiled ourselves, but we cannot return by mere force 
of will. Both as propitiation, therefore, and as reunion, the Atone- 
ment must come from without, and cannot be accomplished by 
those who themselves have need of it. But there is a third con- 
dition, apparently irreconcilable with the other two. This same 
consciousness of guilt which demands an expiation demands that 
it shall be personal, the satisfaction of the sense of personal respon- 
sibility, and of the unconquerable conviction of our own freedom. 
The propitiatory sacrifice which is to effect our reunion must, for 
we are powerless to offer it, come from without : but at the same 
time we cannot but feel that it must come into contact with the 
will, it must be the inward sacrifice, the free-will offering, of the 
whole nature that has sinned. 

II. If the redemptive work of Christ satisfies these conditions 
it is evident that it is not a simple, but a very complex fact. The 
fault of many of the theories of the Atonement has been that, 
though none of them failed to be partially true, they were limited 
to one or other of the various aspects which that mysterious fact 
presents. It is certain, again, that of this complex fact no ade- 
quate explanation can be given. At every stage in the process 
which is generally summed up in the one word Atonement we are 
in presence of forces which issue from infinity and pass out of our 
sight even while we are contemplating their effects. And even if 
the Atonement could be altogether reduced, so to speak, to terms 
of human experience, it will be shown that man's forgiveness, the 
nearest analogy of which we have any knowledge, is an experience 
of which no logical explanation can be given, which seems to share, 
indeed, something of the mystery of its Divine antitype. But though 
it is almost blasphemous to pretend to fathom the depth of the Atone- 
ment, to lay out the whole truth so as to. satisfy the formulae of 
human reason, it is necessary so to understand it as to discern its 
response to the imperative demands of the sense of sin and the 
desire for forgiveness. Whatever the ultimate mysteries of the 
death of Christ may be, it is certain that it has had power to 
convince men of forgiveness and to give them a new life. It must 
therefore in some way satisfy the conditions which, as we have 
seen, are laid down by human consciousness and experience. It 
is under the threefold aspect required by those conditions that the 
doctrine of the Atonement will be here presented. 

1. The death of Christ is, in the first place, to be regarded as 



238 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

propitiatory. On the one hand there is man's desire, natural and 
almost instinctive, to make expiation for his guilt : on the other 
there is the tremendous fact of the wrath of God against sin. The 
death of Christ is the expiation for those past sins which have laid 
the burden of guilt upon the human soul, and it is also the propi- 
tiation of the wrath of God. As we have seen, over against the 
sense of sin and of liability to the Divine wrath there has always 
existed the idea of sacrifice by which that wrath might be averted. 
Man could not offer an acceptable sacrifice : it has been offered for 
him by Christ. That is the simplest, and it would seem the most 
scriptural way of stating the central truth, which is also the deepest 
mystery of the Atonement, and it seems to sum up and include the 
various other metaphors and descriptions of the redemptive work 
of Christ. But its mere statement at once suggests questions, the 
consideration of which will lead to a fuller understanding of the 
doctrine. Thus we have to ask, What is it which is propitiated by 
Christ's death? In other words, What is meant by the wrath of 
God against sin ? 

(a) It should be remembered that though there is great danger 
in anthropomorphism, and though most of the superstition which has 
ever been the shadow cast by religion on the world has arisen from 
an exaggerated conception of the likeness of God to ourselves, yet 
there is, after all, no other way of knowing God than by represent- 
ing Him under conceptions formed by our own consciousness and 
experience, and this method is pre-eminently incumbent upon us 
who believe that man is made 'in the image of God.' We are 
certain, for instance, that love, pity, justice, are affections which, 
however imperfectly they may be found in us, do make for 
goodness, and if we may not ascribe these same affections, infin- 
itely raised and purified, to God, we have no means of conceiving 
His character, of knowing ' with Whom we have to deal.' 

Our knowledge, even of ourselves, is after all fragmentary, 1 and 
thus truths of whose certainty we are convinced may seem irre- 
concilably opposed to each other. Our conception of love, for 
example, is a fragment, and we cannot trace it up to the meeting- 
point at which it is reconciled with justice, so that in our moral 
judgments we are continually oscillating, as it were, between the 
two. But this fact should not hinder us from ascribing to God in 

1 Cf. Mozley, University Sermons, p. 177 (2d ed.) : 'Justice is a fragment, 
mercy is a fragment, mediation is a fragment ; justice, mercy, mediation as a 
reason of mercy, — all three ; what indeed are they but great vistas and ojx n- 
ings info an invisible world in which is the point of view which brings them 
all together ? ' 



vii. The Atonement, 239 

their fullest degree both love and justice, confident that in Him 
they are harmonized because we are confident from the verdict of 
our own consciences that both are good, and because even in such 
imperfect reflections of His image as, for instance, parental love, 
we see at least a partial harmony of them. When then a doubt arises 
as to the literal explanation of the phrase ' the wrath of God, ' the 
difficulty must not be met by the simple assertion that we cannot 
reconcile the idea of wrath with that of the love of God ; we must 
ask whether wrath, as it exists in us, is a good and righteous affec- 
tion, or whether it is always and entirely evil. To this question 
there can be but one answer. We are conscious of a righteous 
anger, of an affection of displeasure that a good man ought to feel 
against sin and evil, and this is amply justified by the scriptural 
references to righteous anger, and by the accounts of our Lord's 
displays of indignation against evil. But though we are thus com- 
pelled to find room, so to speak, for anger in our conception of 
God's character, it is not therefore necessary to ascribe to Him that 
disturbance of the spiritual nature, or that change in the direction 
of the will, which are almost invariable accompaniments of human 
anger. These are the defects of the human affection, from which 
arises the sinful tendency in our anger, and which cannot be thought 
of in connection with the all-holy and all-wise God. On the other 
hand, it is not possible to limit the conception of the ' wrath of 
God ' to the acts whereby sin is or will be punished, which was 
the explanation of some of the Fathers, or to think of it as in the 
future only, to come into existence only on the day of judgment, 
as has been attempted by some modern theologians. The scrip- 
tural expressions, including as we must the passages which speak 
of our Lord's anger, cannot be so weakened. ' The wrath of God ' 
seems to denote no changeful impulse or passing feeling, but the 
fixed and necessary hostility of the Divine Nature to sin ; and the 
idea must further include the manifestation of that hostility, when- 
ever sin comes before God, in external acts of vengeance, punish- 
ment, and destruction. God's anger is not only the displeasure of 
an offended Person : it is possible that this is altogether a wrong 
conception of it : it must be further the expression of justice, 
which not only hates but punishes. The relation of the Divine 
Nature to sin is thus twofold : it is the personal hostility, if we may 
call it so, of holiness to sin, and it is also the righteousness which 
punishes sin because it is lawless. The two ideas are intimately 
connected, and not unfrequently, when we should have expected 
to find in the Bible the wrath of God spoken of, the language of 
judgment and righteousness is substituted for it. Sin is necessa- 



240 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

rily hateful to the holiness of God, but also, because sin is lawless- 
ness, it is judged, condemned, and punished by Him in accord- 
ance with the immutable law of righteousness, which is the law of 
His own Nature. Therefore to turn from God's wrath against sin 
to the mode in which that wrath may be averted, it results that the 
sacrifice offered for sin must be both a propitiation and a satisfac- 
tion. Anger, so we think, is but a feeling, and may be ousted by 
another feeling ; love can strive against wrath and overcome it ; the 
Divine hatred of sin need raise no obstacle to the free forgiveness 
of the sinner. So we might think ; but a true ethical insight shows 
us that this affection of anger, of hatred, is in reality the expression 
of justice, and derives from the law of righteousness, which is not 
above God, nor is it dependent on His Will, for it is Himself. 
' He cannot deny Himself; ' He cannot put away His wrath, until 
the demands of Law have been satisfied, until the sacrifice has been 
offered to expiate, to cover, to atone for the sins of the world. 
The reconciliation to be effected is not merely the reconciliation of 
man to God by the change wrought in man's rebellious nature, but 
it is also the propitiation of God Himself, whose wrath unappeased 
and whose justice unsatisfied are the barriers thrown across the 
sinner's path to restoration. 

(&) But how, we ask further, was this propitiation made by the 
Sacrifice on the Cross? Or, to put the question rather differently, 
what was it that gave to the death of Christ its propitiatory value ? 
In attempting to suggest an answer to this question, it is necessary 
to bear in mind the distinction between the actual event, or series 
of events, which constituted the Propitiatory Sacrifice, and that inner 
element which was thereby manifested, and which gave to the 
actual event its worth. St. Bernard expressed the distinction in 
the well-known words, ' Not His death, but His willing acceptance 
of death, was pleasing to God,' and there can be no doubt that 
throughout the New Testament special stress is laid upon the 
perfect obedience manifested in the life and death of Christ, upon 
the accomplishment of His Father's will which He ever kept in 
view, and upon the contrast thus marked between the Mosaic sac- 
rifices and the one atoning offering. ' Sacrifices and offerings and 
whole burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin Thou wouldest not, 
neither hadst pleasure therein ; . . . then hath He said, Lo, I am 
come to do Thy will. ' 

That the perfect obedience displayed in the passion and death 
of our Lord was the element which gave to the sacrifice its pro- 
pitiatory value will be more readily understood when it is remem- 
bered that the essence of man's sin was from the first disobedience, 



vii. The Atonement. 241 

the rebellion of the human will against the commands of God. The 
perfect sacrifice was offered by One Who, being man with all man's 
liability to temptation, that is, with all the instruments of sin at His 
disposal, and exposed to every suggestion to set up His will against 
that of the Father, yet throughout His life continued unswervingly 
bent on doing ' not His own will, but the will of the Father, Who sent 
Him,' and Who thus displayed the original perfection of human 
nature, the unbroken union with the life of God. On the cross the 
final struggle, the supreme temptation, took place. The obedience 
shown throughout His life was there manifested in death. ' He 
became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.' At every 
moment of the passion there might have been a refusal to undergo 
the shame and the torture of body and spirit. At any stage 
during the long struggle, He might have ended it all by a single 
acquiescence in evil, a single submission to the law of unrighteous- 
ness. At each moment, therefore, His will was exerted to keep 
itself in union with the will of God ; it was not a mere submission at 
the outset once for all, but a continuous series of voluntary acts of 
resignation and obedience. Here then is the spirit of sacrifice 
which God demands, and which could not be found in the sacri- 
fices of the Mosaic law, or in any offering of sinful man. The 
essence of the Atonement was the mind of Christ therein displayed, 
the obedience gradually learnt and therein perfected, the will of 
Christ therein proved to be one with the Father's will. 

But we may discern a further element of propitiation in the death 
of our Lord. The law of righteousness, the justice of God, 
demands not only obedience in the present, but vengeance for the 
past. ' The sins done aforetime ' had been ' passed over in the 
forbearance of God ' for His own purposes, which are not revealed 
to us : this ' passing over ' had obscured the true nature of sin and of 
the Divine justice. Men had come to have easy thoughts of sin 
and its consequences ; the heathen felt but vaguely the burden of 
guilt, the Jew trusted in the mere external works of the law. In 
the death of Christ a manifestation was made of the righteousness 
of God, of His wrath, the absolute hostility of His nature to sin. 
' God set Him forth to be a propitiation, through faith, by His 
blood, to show His righteousness, because of the passing over of 
the sins done aforetime, in the forbearance of God.' But this 
manifestation of Divine justice might have been made by mere 
punishment : it became a propitiation, in that He, the self-chosen 
victim, by His acceptance of it, recognized the righteousness of the 
law which was vindicated on the cross. Men had refused to 
acknowledge God's justice in the consequences of sin ; nothing 

16 



242 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

but the willing acceptance Of suffering, as the due portion of the 
human nature in which the sin was wrought, could have so declared 
the justice of God's law as to be a propitiation of Divine wrath. 
The cross was, on the one hand, the proclamation of God's ordi- 
nance against sin, on the other it was the response of man at length 
acknowledging the righteousness of the condemnation. 1 

But on looking more closely into the matter, it is obvious that 
these explanations are not by themselves enough to account for 
the scriptural facts which we call the Atonement. We cannot 
ignore that, whether we consider the Old Testament anticipations 
or the New Testament narrative of our Lord's work, His death, 
apart from the obedience manifested in it, occupies a unique place, 
and that stress is laid on it which would be unaccountable were it 
only the extreme trial of His obedience. The frequent declaration 
that it was necessary, that ' it behooved Christ to die,' seems to 
point to something exceptional in it, something more than the 
mere close of His spotless life. So again the mysterious dread 
and horror with which He looked forward to it testify to something 
in it which goes far beyond any human experience of death. 2 And 
what we gather from the New Testament must be combined with 
the Old Testament premonitions of Christ's death, as typified by 
the Mosaic sacrifices. There can be no question that death was, 
speaking generally, an integral part of the idea of sacrifice for sin, 
and that the distinguishing ceremonial of the slaying of the victim 
points to a special significance in death as connected with expi- 
ation and propitiation. Therefore, although we may still recognize 
that it was the spirit of obedience and voluntary submission which 
gave atoning value to the death of Christ, we cannot ignore the 
necessity of death as the appointed form which the obedience took. 
Had He not obeyed, He would not have atoned ; but had He not 
died, the obedience would have lacked just that element which 
made it an atonement for sin. The obedience was intended to issue 
in death. St. Bernard's saying, though true as he meant it, is, if 
taken quite literally, too sharp an antithesis. There is nothing 

1 Cf. McLeod Campbell, 'The Nature of the Atonement,' pp. 117, 118,119, 
I2 7> 347 : ' That oneness of mind with the Father, which towards man took 
the form of condemnation of sin, would in the Son's dealing with the Father 
in relation to our sins take the form of a perfect confession of our sins. This 
confession, as to its own nature, must have been a perfect Amen in humanity 
to the udgment of God on the sin of man.' * In Christ tasting death [as] the 
wages of sin . . . was a perfecting of the Divine response in humanity to the 
Divine condemnation of sin.' 

2 See Dale. Atonement, pp. 49 ff. ; Schmidt in Herzog's Real. Encykl., 
xvi. 403. 



vii. The Atonement, 243 

well-pleasing to God in death alone, it is true ; but there is, so He 
has revealed it, something well-pleasing to His righteousness, 
something propitiatory in death, if as a further condition the 
perfect obedience of the victim is thereby displayed. 

We are driven to the same conclusion by the second explanation 
of our Lord's sacrifice given above. It is not enough to say that 
He died in order to manifest God's righteous judgment against 
sin, for the question remains, Why is death the requisite manifesta- 
tion of judgment? If He endured it because it is the only fitting 
punishment, why is it in such a signal manner the penalty of sin ? 
We can point, indeed, to the Divine principle : ' The soul that 
sinneth, it shall die,' as we can point to God's declared will that ex- 
piation shall be made by means of death ; but in neither case, 
whether death be looked upon as the punishment or as the expia- 
tion of sin, is there any explanation of its unique position. It may 
well be that here we are confronted by the final mystery, and that 
the propitiatory virtue of Christ's death, typified by the slaying of 
animal victims under the law, foreshadowed by the almost univer- 
sal belief in the expiation of blood, acknowledged with wonder- 
ing gratitude by the human heart, depends upon the unsearchable 
will and hidden purposes of God, except in so far as we can see in 
it the manifestation at once of Christ's perfect obedience and of 
the righteousness of Divine judgment. If an attempt is made to 
penetrate further into the mystery of Redemption, it can be but 
a speculation, but it will be saved from overboldness if it follows 
the general lines of God's action as revealed in His Word. 

Some light may be thrown upon the mystery of Christ's death 
by considering the scriptural view of death in general as the 
penalty of sin. It is not the mere physical act of dying, for that, 
as St. Athanasius says, is natural to man, 1 and can be traced in the 
animal world in the ages before man existed. Besides, our Lord 
is said to have delivered us from death, and this clearly cannot 
mean physical death, since to this all men are still subject, but 
rather spiritual death ; and the death which is spoken of as the 
penalty of sin must therefore also be spiritual. In this sense death 
can be no other than the final removal from us of God's presence, 
the completion of the alienation from the Divine life which sin 
began. But, considering the close connection throughout the 

1 De Incarn. Verbi, 4: 'Man is by nature mortal.' St. Athanasius held, 
however, that this * natural corruption ' would have been suspended, bat for 
the Fall, by the help of the Logos empowering man to live the Divine life. 
See on the whole subject Gore, The Christian Doctrine of Sin, in the 
Guardian, March 27, 1SS9. 



244 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

Bible of physical and spiritual death, may it not be that the former 
is more than the symbol and type of the latter, that it is actually 
its consummation? If, again, death be truly represented by the 
Christian consciousness as the close of man's probation, does not 
this also point to its being the moment when the light of God's 
presence, the strength of His life, is finally withdrawn from the 
impenitent sinner, and the spiritual death, which is the one essen- 
tial punishment of sin, falls upon him? The sentence of death, 
then, under which the whole world lay apart from the Atonement 1 
was the declaration that every man who by inheritance and by his 
own act shared in Adam's sin, should at the moment of physical 
death experience also the full measure of spiritual death. The 
common lot of death thus involved the consciousness of separation 
from the life of God, and when we so regard it we can understand 
something of the horror which its anticipation brought upon the 
soul of the Son of God. 2 He must pass through this last and most 
awful human experience ; not only because it was human, but 
because by the victorious endurance of it alone could the propiti- 
ation be accomplished. The thought throws light upon the prom- 
inence given to the death of Christ, upon His dread of it, upon 
His mysterious cry of dereliction upon the cross. It shows us 
how, though the experience was common to man, yet in Him it 
was in a twofold manner unique. The withdrawal of God's pres- 
ence, awful as it is to the sin-hardened nature of man, must have 
been immeasurably more bitter to Him Who was One with the 
Father, whose ' meat was to do the will of His Father.' Just as 
we may believe the tortures of the cross to have been specially 
grievous to the perfect body which was unstained by sin, though 
other men have endured them ; so, though all have to pass through 
death with its accompanying terror of the loss of God's presence, 
none can realize what that experience was to Him, because He 
was the Son of God. The death of Christ was therefore unique 
because of the nature of Him Who underwent it. But it was also 
unique in its results. No other death had been a propitiation for 
sin, for in no other death had this overwhelming consciousness of 
dereliction been endured victoriously, with no failure of perfect 
obedience, no shrinking of the will from the ordained task. In 
this final experience the offering was complete, the essence of the 
propitiation was secured, for the actual result of all human sin was 

1 It should be remembered that the Church has always regarded the 
Atonement as having a retrospective effect, extending back to the first repre- 
sentatives of the human race. 

2 Cf. Schmidt, in Ilerzog's Real Encykl., Art. Versonung, xvi. 403. 



:: Tlie Atonement. :_" 

herein made the very revelation of holiness itself, the means 
v.here:;." ;/-r :.:.:::. r_;_ :r_± "ill :: G:i. ~: :":.: :::___ _r::;_ finally 
broken, was finally perfected. The propitiatory value, therefore, of 
the sacrifice of Christ lay in His absolute obedience, in His willing 
acceptance of suffering, which was thereby acknowledged as the due 
reward of sin, and in the death which was the essential form of 
both, — for death is the culminating point of the alienation from God, 
which is both sin and its punishment. He alone endured it victori- 
ously and without sin ; He alone, therefore, transformed it from the 
sign and occasion of God's wrath into a well-pleasing offering ; He 
took the punishment and made it a propitiation. * The chastisement 
of our peace was upon Him ; and with His stripes we are healed.' 

(r) So far we have considered the sacrifice of Christ in its aspect 
Godwards ; we have tried to find an answer to the question, How 
did the death of Christ propitiate the wrath of God? There 
remains the farther question, How was it a sacrifice for us ? It 
was, we can see, a perfect offering acceptable to God ; but how 
has it availed 'for us men'? The mind shrinks from a purely 
external Atonement, and part of the imperfection of the Mosaic 
sacrifices consisted in the merely artificial relation between the 
offender and the victim. In the perfect sacrifice this relation 
must be real ; and we are thus led to the truth, so often over- 
looked, but impressed on every page of the New Testament, that 
He who died for our sins was our true representative in that He 
was truly man. Without for the present going into the more 
mystical doctrine of Christ as the second Adam, the spiritual head 
of our race, what is here emphasized is the reality and perfection 
of His human nature, which gave Him the right to offer a repre- 
sentative sacrifice. 1 ' For verily not of angels doth He take hold, 
but He taketh hold of the seed of Abraham. Wherefore it behooved 
Him in all things to be made like unto His brethren, that He 
might be a merciful and foithful High Priest in things pertaining to 
God, to make propitiation for the sins of the people.' Being thus 
■ taken from among men,' He was ' appointed for, or on behalf of, 
"---:' z~i z':t ;u=:if: = rl:r. :: K:s ?rir=-.r.::£ :s :"~e zzzr.z'.tzt 
reality of His humanity, which, if we may so speak, overlay and 
hid His Divinity, so that 'though He was a Son,' unchangeably 'in 

1 Irenaeus is foil of this thought, though it is not disentangled from other 
explanations of the death of Christ Cf. especially, V. xxiii. 2 : 'Recapiru- 
lans enim universum hominem in se ab initio usque ad finem. recapitnlatus et 
mortem ejus/ Cf. also Athanasius, de Incarn. Verbi. 9, in which he sur : e - : - 
that it was the Divine power of the Logos in the bodflv nature of Christ that 
r:\i_r H:5 iz:r.±:t re; re:-; .::.:: t : ; t._ ;.= H : s it~.z'£ Ti:z:ri:\is : ■--: i = -:l. 



246 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

the form of God,' ' yet learnt He obedience by the things which 
He suffered,' and thus became for us a perfect Priest. The sinless 
perfection of Christ, far from removing Him out of the sphere of 
our sinful lives, made Him perfectly representative ; for He not 
only possessed in their greatest perfection all the powers and 
capacities which are the instruments of sin, but in the strength of 
His sinlessness and of His love He could feel for all men and 
accept them as His brethren, though they were sinners. Our 
High Priest ' hath been in all points like as we are, yet without 
sin.' The holiest man has some part of his nature stunted and 
repressed by sin, and is so far incomplete, unrepresentative; but 
He, unweakened and unmarred in any point by sin, can without 
holding anything back represent human nature in its perfection 
and entirety. 

The representative character of Christ is manifested in a different 
aspect, according as He is regarded as the victim or as the priest 
offering the sacrifice. As the victim He must be the sin-bearer, 
for the transfer of guilt — which under the Mosaic system was 
merely symbolized by the act of laying hands on the victim's 
head — must for a true propitiatory sacrifice be more than external 
and artificial. That is to say, there must be a real meaning in St. 
Paul's tremendous words, ' Him Who knew no sin He made to be 
sin on our behalf,' in the passages in which He is described as 
bearing our sins, 1 in the great prophecy which told that ' the Lord 
hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.' How can we find an 
explanation of the paradox so boldly stated by St. Paul, that He 
who knew no sin was yet made sin ? We may not surely take all 
these plain phrases to mean that He bore the punishment of our 
sins ; it would have been easy to say that, had it been meant. No, 
the relation typified by the Mosaic offerings must be real, and yet 
the expression ' He made Him to be sin ' cannot without blasphemy 
be understood to mean that God the Father actually made His 
Son to sin. The solution of the difficulty can only be found in 
the truth of the Incarnation. In order that the sacrifice might be 
representative, He took upon Him the whole of our human nature, 
and became flesh, conditioned though that fleshly nature was 
throughout by sin. 2 It was not only in His death that we contem- 
plate Him as the sin-bearer, but throughout His life He was, as it 

1 See especially Heb. ix. 28, which is an echo of the LXX. of Is. liii. 12. 

2 Athan., c. Ar., i. 43 : 'He put on the flesh which was enslaved to sin.' 
Cf. also Augustine, de Musica, VI. iv : ' Hominem sine peccato, non sine 
peccatoris conditione suscepit. Nam et nasci humanitus, et pati et mori 
voluit.' I owe this reference to Norn's, Rudiments of Theology, p. 61 n. 



vii. The Atonement. 247 

were, conditioned by the inherent sinfulness of humanity. The 
Crucifixion does not come as the unexpectedly shameful end of a 
glorious and untroubled life, though it was undoubtedly in a 
special sense the manifestation of the ' curse ' under which He 
laid Himself. We cannot say that at a given moment in His life, 
as when the sinner's hands were laid upon the victim's head and 
his guilt was transferred, He began to bear our iniquity, for the 
very nature which He took, freed though it was in Him from 
hereditary guilt, was in itself, by its necessary human relations, 
sin-bearing. Nor did His personal sinlessness make this impossible 
or unreal ; rather it intensified it. As St. Matthew tells us, even 
in relation to bodily sickness and infirmity, that He bore what He 
took away, — ' Himself took our infirmities, and bare our diseases,' 
— so it Was with our redemption from sin. In taking it away, He 
had to bear its weight, intensified by reason of that very self- 
sacrificing love which made Him realize with more than human 
keenness the sinfulness of the human nature into which He had 
come. There is thus nothing artificial or external in His sin-bearing, 
for His human nature was so real and so perfect that He was 
involved, so to speak, in all the consequences of the sin which is so 
tremendous a factor in human life, even to the enduring of the very 
sufferings and death which in us are the penal results and final out- 
come of sin, but in Him were the means of His free self-sacrifice. 

Once more He was our representative as the Priest who offered 
the sacrifice. The requisite conditions of such an office are stated, 
in the Epistle to the Hebrews, to be complete human sympathy, 
and yet such separateness from sin, and from all limitations of 
incompleteness, as can only be Divine. ' It behooved Him in all 
things to be made like unto His brethren, that He might be a 
merciful and faithful high priest ; ' * but He, because He abideth 
forever, hath His priesthood unchangeable ... for such a high 
priest became us, holy, harmless, undefiled, separated from sinners, 
and made higher than the heavens ; ' ' for the law appointed men 
high priests, having infirmity ; but the word of the oath, which 
was after the law, appointeth a Son, perfected for evermore.' l In 
these and similar passages the doctrine of the Priesthood of Christ 
is developed, and it is obvious that quite as much stress is laid on 
His unlikeness as on His likeness to us. 2 He is our representative 

1 Heb. ii. 17 ; vii. 24, 26, 28; cf. ix. 13, 14, 24, 25, 26; x. n, 12, 13. 14. 

2 Cf. Athan., c. Ar., ii. 69 ' He sends His own Son, and He becomes Son 
of Man, by taking created flesh ; that, since all were under sentence of death, 
He, being other than them all, might Himself for all offer to death His own 
body.' 






248 The Religion of the Incantation. 

as Priest, because He is both man and more than man, and can 
therefore perform for us what we could not and cannot perform for 
ourselves, in offering the perfect propitiatory sacrifice. Here is 
the true vicariousness of the Atonement, which consisted, not, as 
we shall see later, in the substitution of His punishment for ours, 
but in His offering the sacrifice which man had neither purity nor 
power to offer. From out of the very heart and centre of the 
human nature which was so enslaved and corrupted by sin that no 
human offering was acceptable to God, there is raised the sinless 
sacrifice of perfect humanity by the God-Man, our great High 
Priest : human in the completeness of His sympathy, Divine in the 
unique power of His Priesthood. So is the condition of the law 
of righteousness fulfilled, and the sacrifice of obedience unto 
death is offered by His submission to all that constitutes in sinners 
the consummation and the punishment of their sin, which He 
transformed into the occasion and the manifestation of His perfect 
holiness. And it is a representative sacrifice, for unique though it 
is, it consists of no unheard-of experience, of no merely symbolical 
ceremony, unrelated and unmeaning to us ; but of just those uni- 
versal incidents of suffering which, though He must have felt them 
with a bitterness unknown to us, are intensely human, — poverty, 
misunderstanding, failure, treachery, rejection, bodily anguish, 
spiritual desolation, death. ' Surely He hath borne our griefs, and 
carried our sorrows. . . . The chastisement of our peace was upon 
Him/ and therefore ' by His stripes we are healed.' 

2. It is not enough to consider the death of Christ only as pro- 
pitiatory, or as standing alone in relation to our redemption. We 
have seen how it secured our propitiation, and in what sense it has 
a unique place in relation both to our Lord Himself and to man. 
There remains the further aspect of His redemptive work, in which 
it is regarded as effecting our reunion with God, by delivering us 
from the power of sin, and by filling us with the Divine gift of 
life. This, it should be noticed, is the conception of our Lord's 
work which was chiefly in the minds of the early Christian writers, 
though in almost all it was combined with the acknowledgment of 
His deliverance of man from guilt and from the wrath of God by 
His representative propitiation. 1 But to their consciousness the 

1 The two aspects of the Atonement are frequently presented by St. 
Athanasius, de Incarn. Verbi. Thus (ch. 10) ' By the sacrifice of His own 
Body He both put an end to the law which was against us, and gave us a fresh 
beginning of life, in that He bestowed on us the hope of resurrection.' Cf. 
also chs. 8 and 9. Again (ch. 25), 'As He offered His Body unto death for 
all ; so by it He again threw open the way to heaven.' 



vii. The Atonement. 249 

power of sin and of the spiritual forces with which man is sur- 
rounded was so continually present that they were naturally 
inclined to look mainly at that side of the Atonement which repre- 
sents it as the victory over sin and Satan and the restoration of 
man to the life of God. And this view, though by no means to 
the exclusion of the propitiatory aspect, is amply justified by the 
Bible. Considered as restoration, there seem to be three grades 
or stages of redemption indicated in the New Testament. First, 
there is the unanimous declaration that the object of our Lord's 
life and death was to free us from sin. In the most sacrificial 
descriptions of His work this further result of the Atonement is 
implied. The ' Lamb of God ' is to ' take away the sin of the 
world ; '. His Blood was to be ' shed for the remission of sins;' by 
1 the precious Blood of Jesus Christ, as of a Lamb without blemish,' 
men were ' redeemed from their vain conversation ; ' He ' gave 
Himself for us, that He might redeem us from all iniquity? In 
the next place, this deliverance from sin is identified with the gift 
of life, which is repeatedly connected with our Lord's life and 
death. ' I am come that they might have life ; ' for ' I will give 
My flesh for the life of the world.' ' He died for all, that they 
which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto 
Him Who died for them and rose again.' He 'bare our sins in 
His own body on the tree, that we being dead to sins might live 
unto righteousness.' Lastly, this new life is to issue in union with 
the life of God in Christ. ' Christ suffered for sins, the just for 
the unjust, that He might bring us to God.' ' In Christ Jesus ye 
that once were far off are made nigh in the Blood of Christ.' In 
such passages the Apostles are only drawing out the meaning of 
our Lord's own declaration, * I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men 
unto Me.' 

Our Lord's death is thus intimately connected by the New Tes- 
tament writers with the restoration of man to union with God by 
means of the gift of life ; but it should be noticed that, unique and 
necessary as His death was, it is continually spoken of in close con- 
nection with the Resurrection or the Ascension, for in these, as 
was foreshadowed by the typical ceremonies of the Law, the sacri- 
fice culminated by the presentation of the ' life which had willingly 
passed through death ' before the altar of God's presence. The 
reason is clear. Pardon for the past, deliverance from guilt, pro- 
pitiation of the just wrath of God, are necessary and all-important ; 
but they cannot stand alone. They must, for man is helpless and 
weak, be succeeded by the gift of life, and for this we must look to 
those mighty acts in which the One Sacrifice reached its full con- 



250 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

summation. Thus our Lord Himself declares that He died in 
order to rise again : ' I lay down My life that [in order that] I may 
take it again.' So to St. Paul the Resurrection is the necessary 
completion of the process which was begun by the death. ' He 
was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justifi- 
cation.' ' If while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God 
through the death of His Son, much more being reconciled, shall 
we be saved through [in] His life.' 'We were buried with Him 
through baptism unto death ; that [in order that ] like as Christ 
was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we 
also might walk in newness of life.' Even the passages which 
speak of our salvation as effected by virtue of Christ's Blood, refer, 
according to the Jewish conception of the ' blood which is the life,' 
not only, or even chiefly, to the blood-shedding in death, but to the 
heavenly ' sprinkling ' of the principle of life, its presentation in 
heaven by means of the Resurrection and Ascension. The whole 
process is described in what may be called the central core of St. 
Paul's theology, the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans. 
' It is Christ Jesus that died, yea rather, that was raised from the 
dead, Who is at the Right Hand of God, Who also maketh interces- 
sion for us.' It has been the fault of much popular theology to 
think only of our deliverance from wrath by the sacrificial death of 
Christ, and to neglect the infinitely important continuation of the 
process thus begun. The Gospel is a religion of life, the call to a 
life of union with God by means of the grace which flows from the 
mediation of the risen and ascended Saviour. We need not discuss 
the comparative importance of the two aspects of the work of 
Atonement, for propitiation and reunion, pardon and life, are alike 
necessary elements in salvation, and by the love of God in Christ 
are united in the sacrifice which was begun on Calvary, and is for- 
ever presented for our redemption before the throne of God in 
heaven. 

3. So far we have been considering the Atonement as our Lord's 
work on behalf of men : we have now to consider it as meeting the 
inevitable demand of the human conscience that this vicarious sacri- 
fice shall in some way satisfy man's sense of personal responsibility ; 
that by means of the Atonement man shall, so far as he can, make 
amends for his own sin. The charge of injustice, as it is generally 
urged against the doctrine of the Atonement, rests, as will be shown, 
upon a fundamental misconception as to the nature of Christ's 
work for us ; but it is also commonly assumed that by the death 
of Christ all was done for man, and nothing in man, so that we are 
thereby relieved of all responsibility for our own wilful acts. It is 



vii. The Atonement. 251 

this notion that we have now to investigate. First, however, we 
must acknowledge the truth contained in it. The Atonement is, 
after all, God's forgiveness of us in Christ, and no forgiveness is 
conceivable which does not in some degree relieve the offender of 
the consequences of his offence. Human forgiveness, though it 
may in some cases, perhaps, remit no part of the external penalty 
due to wrong-doing, must, in the very act of forgiving, put away 
and abolish the anger of the offended person, the alienation which 
the offence has caused, and which is certainly part, sometimes the 
greatest part, of the penal consequences of an offence. Human 
forgiveness, therefore, necessarily transgresses the strict law of retri- 
bution : yet no one can seriously contend that forgiveness is either 
impossible or immoral. And more than this, there is even in our 
imperfect forgiveness a power to blot out guilt, and to restore the 
offender to new life. Inexplicable though the fact may be, expe- 
rience tells us that forgiveness avails to lift the load of guilt that 
presses upon an offender. A change passes over him that can only 
be described as regenerative, life-giving ; and thus the assurance 
of pardon, however conveyed, may be said to obliterate in some 
degree the consequences of the past. 1 It is true that this result of 
forgiveness cannot be explained logically so as to satisfy the reason, 
but the possibility and the power of pardon are nevertheless facts 
of human experience. The Atonement is undoubtedly a mystery, 
but all forgiveness is a mystery. The Atonement undoubtedly 
transgresses the strict law of exact retribution, but all forgiveness 
transgresses it. And we may believe that human forgiveness is, in 
spite of all its imperfection, like that of God, for this is surely the 
lesson of the Lord's Prayer, ' Forgive us our trespasses, as we 
forgive them that trespass against us.' Experience and conscience, 
therefore, lead us to expect that the Divine method of forgiveness 
will both disprove the exaggerated idea of personal responsibility, 
which is based on a false estimate of man's power, and will also 
transcend reason by rising into a region of mystery and of miracle. 2 
We have to deal in this sphere of pardon with a God Who ' declares 
His almighty power most chiefly in showing mercy and pity.' 

One aspect of this mystery is to be found in the truth, stamped 
on every page of the New Testament, of the mystical union be- 
tween Christ and His people. By virtue of this union His acts are 

1 Cf. Westcott, Historic Faith, p. 133. 

2 Cf. Magee, The Gospel and the Age, pp. 270 ff. Bishop Magee, however, 
seems to exaggerate the certainty and relentlessness of the temporal punish- 
ment of sin (cf. against this Dale, The Atonement, Lect. viii.), and to over- 
look the force of the analogy from human experience of forgiveness. 



252 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

ascribed to us ; and thus, according to St. Paul, we died in Him, 
we are raised in Him, and the sacrifice which He offered, we have 
also offered, as in Him. The doctrine of the Second Adam, of 
the spiritual headship of Christ, would not indeed, if it stood alone, 
satisfy the demands of the conscience ; but when taken in connec- 
tion with the practical sacramental teaching which is based upon it, 
it points to the solution of the problem. By the Incarnation we 
are taken up into Him, and therefore the acts that in His human 
nature He performed are our acts, by virtue of that union which is 
described by Him as the union of a vine with its branches, by St. 
Paul as that of the head with the members of a body. Butin con- 
sidering the results of this union, the reciprocal communication 
of the weakness of our bodily nature to Him, of His victorious 
deeds in the body to us, a distinction must be drawn between 
that part of His work which can, and that which cannot, be shared 
by us. Of one part of His work, of the sacrifice which He offered 
for man's guilt, the essence was its vicariousness. Man could not 
and never can offer a sacrifice which can avail to propitiate for the 
sins of the past. It is only in virtue of that one final and perfect 
propitiation that we can draw nigh to God, can accomplish any- 
thing good, can recognize that we are delivered from wrath. The 
sins of the past are cancelled, the guilt is wiped out : in this respect 
all was accomplished by Him for us who are in Him, and nothing 
remains for us to do. He as our Representative, because He 
shares our nature, can offer for us a prevailing sacrifice ; only as 
His brethren, because He has united us to Him, are we enabled to 
plead the sacrifice which He offered. It is indeed offered for us, 
for it was utterly impossible that we could offer it for ourselves ; it 
was the necessary initial step, which man could not take, towards 
union with the righteous Father. As our spiritual head, the second 
Adam, the Captain of our salvation, He had the right of offering on 
our behalf; as in Him by virtue of the Incarnation we are empow- 
ered to claim the infinite blessings of the redemption so obtained. 1 
If this is mysterious, irrational, transcendental, so is all morality ; 
for at the root of all morality lies the power of self-sacrifice, which 
is nothing but the impulse of love to make a vicarious offering for 
its fellows, and the virtue of such an offering to restore and to 
quicken. 2 The righteousness of God required from the human 

1 Cf. Ath., c. Ar., iii. 34. ' As the Lord in putting on the body, became Man, 
so we men are made gods by the Word, being taken into Him through His 
Flesh, and from henceforth inherit life eternal.' 

' z For this thought fully drawn out, see Holland, Creed and Character, pp. 
212 ff. 



vii. The Atonement. 253 

nature which had sinned the sacrifice of a perfect obedience mani- 
fested in and through death : that is the unique and unapproach- 
able mystery of the Atonement ; but that the sacrifice should be 
offered by a sinless Man, and that we should be accepted by God 
in virtue of His propitiation and because of our union with Him, 
that, though mysterious enough, as human reason counts mystery, 
is prefigured and illustrated and explained by all the deepest expe- 
riences of the race, by all that is most human, though it most 
evades logical analysis, in our moral consciousness. 1 

There is, then, no additional propitiation demanded from us. 
The Atonement, in this aspect, requires nothing from us, for the 
forgiveness is there, bestowed upon us by God in consequence of 
the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. But like the gifts of grace which 
come after forgiveness, the forgiveness itself has to be personally 
accepted by us ; it must be brought into contact with each man's 
will. So regarded, the Atonement, though the great gift of recon- 
ciliation is absolutely free, the product of the spontaneous love of 
God, does lay upon us an obligation. On our part faith is de- 
manded that we may realize, and appropriate, and associate our- 
selves with the pardon which is ours in Christ. This is not the 
place for a full discussion of justifying faith; it is enough to indi- 
cate what seems to be its relation to the Atonement, as being man's 
share in the propitiatory work of Christ. It is often said that the 
faith which justifies is simply trust ; 2 but it must surely be a more 
complex moral act than this. If faith is the acceptance of Christ's 
propitiation, it must contain, in the first place, that longing for 
reconciliation which springs from the personal consciousness of sin 
as alienation from God, and from horror of its guilt and power. 
There must then ensue the recognition of man's complete power- 
lessness to free himself from sin, and a deeply humble sense of 
dependence on God's mercy ; but this mere trust in His mercy is 
not enough, for it would not satisfy the sense of sin. The sinner 
has to own that God is not merely benevolent, and that sin must 
be punished. Therefore faith must contain the recognition of the 
justice of the Divine law against sin, manifested in the death of 
Christ. Faith, in short, starts from the longing for a representative 
to atone for us, and it ends with the recognition of Christ as our 
representative, of His Atonement as sufficient, and of His death as 
displaying the due reward of sin. For the Atonement cannot be 
a mere external act. If Christ is our representative, He must be 

1 On the truth of the solidarity of all men in Christ, see Westcott, The Vic- 
tory of the Cross, pp 6-5^. 

2 See, e, g., Moule, Outlines of Christian Doctrine, p. 185. 



254 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

acknowledged by those whom He represents ; otherwise His endur- 
ance of suffering would avail nothing for them, for God will not be 
satisfied with the mere infliction of punishment. But if the result 
of His death is that men are brought, one by one, age after age, to 
acknowledge the righteousness of the law for which He suffered, 
to recognize the result of sin to which sin has blinded them, then 
there has been made on their part the first step towards the great 
reconciliation. Faith identifies the individual with the sacrifice 
which has been offered for him, and therefore with Christ's attitude 
towards God and towards sin, and though it it is but the first step, 
yet it is emphatically that by reason of which we are justified. For 
since we are thus identified with the sacrifice, God accepts the 
first step for the whole course, of which it is the pledge and antici- 
pation. We are justified because we believe in God, but also 
because God believes in us. 1 Faith, being what it is, a complex 
moral act whereby Christ's propitiation is accepted by man, implies 
an attitude of mind towards sin so right that, though it is but the 
first movement of the soul in Christ, God takes it for the whole, 
sees us as wholly in Him, reckons it to us as righteousness. But 
only because it is as a matter of fact the first, the hardest, perhaps, 
and the most necessary, but still only the first step towards com- 
plete sanctification. And if we now ask what is the further course 
of sanctification, the answer will show the full relation of the sac- 
rifice of Christ to man's will and conscience. For the life of sanc- 
tification is nothing else but the ' imitation of Christ ' in that task 
of ' learning obedience ' to which His life was devoted, and which 
His death completed. In us too, as in Him, that task has to be 
accomplished by suffering. ' He learnt obedience by the things 
which He suffered.' ' It became Him ... in bringing many sons 
unto glory, to make the Captain of their salvation perfect through 
sufferings.' That same path towards perfection lies before all who 
are justified by faith in His atoning sacrifice. For justification is 
a spiritual act answering to the spiritual act of faith. The spiritual 
germ of vitality thus implanted in us has to be developed in the 
sphere in which the consequences of sin naturally and inevitably 
work themselves out, in the bodily nature of man. ' Even we,' says 
St. Paul, ' which have the first-fruits of the Spirit,' even we are 
waiting for the further process, for ' the adoption, to wit the 
redemption, of our body.' And the process consists in so following 
' the Captain of our salvation ' that, like Him, we accept every one 

1 Cf. Aug., de Trin., i. 10 : 'Tales nos amat Deus, quales futuri sumus, 
no:i quales sumus.' 



vii. The Atonement. 255 

of those sufferings which are the consequences of sin, but accept 
them not as punishment imposed from without upon unwilling 
offenders, but as the material of our free-will sacrifice. From no 
one pang or trial of our nature has He delivered us, indeed He 
has rather laid them upon us more unsparingly, more inevitably. 
But the sufferings from which He would not deliver us, He has 
transformed for us. They are no longer penal, but remedial and 
penitential. Pain has become the chastisement of a Father Who 
loves us, and death the passage into His very presence. And this 
He has done for us by the bestowal upon us of spiritual vitality. 
The germ is implanted by the act of forgiveness which removes the 
wrath and the impending death, and this germ of life, cherished 
and developed by the gifts which flow from His mediation and 
intercession, by the Holy Spirit Whom He sends to dwell in us, 
works on all the penalties of sin, and makes them the sacrifice 
which we offer in Him. This is the ' law of the Spirit of life.' ' If 
Christ be in you, the body is dead because of sin ; but the Spirit is 
life, because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him that raised 
up jesus from the dead dwell in you, He that raised up Christ from 
the dead shall also quicken your mortal bodies by His Spirit that 
dwelleth in you.' 

Our personal share, then, in the Atonement is not mere passiv- 
ity. It consists, first, in the acceptance of God's forgiveness in 
Christ, our self-identification with Christ's atoning attitude, and 
then in working out, by the power of the life bestowed upon us, all 
the consequences of forgiveness, the transformation of punishment 
into sacrifice, the imitation of Christ in His perfect obedience to 
the law of righteousness, the gradual sanctification of body, soul, 
and spirit, by the grace which enables us to ' suffer with Him.' 

,111. The doctrine of Atonement, more than any of the great 
truths of Christianity, has been misconceived and misrepresented, 
and has therefore not only been rejected itself, but has sometimes 
been the cause of the rejection of the whole Christian system. 
The truth of the vicarious sacrifice has been isolated till it has 
almost become untrue, and, mysterious as it undoubtedly is, it 
has been so stated as to be not only mysterious, but contrary to 
reason and even to conscience. One most terrible misconception 
it is hardly necessary to do more than mention. The truth of the 
wrath of God against sin and of the love of Christ by which that 
wrath was removed, has been perverted into a belief in a diver- 
gence of will between God the Father and God the Son, as if it 
was the Father's will that sinners should perish, the Son's will that 
they should be saved ; as if the Atonement consisted in the pro- 



256 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

pitiation of the wrathful God by the substituted punishment of the 
innocent for the guilty. It will be seen that while this statement 
seems to represent the Catholic doctrine, in reality it introduces 
a most vital difference. There can be no divergence of will 
between the Persons of the Blessed Trinity ; and, in regard to 
this special dealing with man, we have the clearest testimony of 
Revelation that the whole Godhead shared in the work. Here, 
as always, God the Father is revealed as the source and origin of 
all good. ' God so loved the world that He gave His only begot- 
ten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but 
have everlasting life.' ' God was in Christ reconciling the world 
to Himself.' The beginning and the end of the Atonement is the 
love of God : the death of Christ was not the cause, but the reve- 
lation of that love. 1 That it was the second Person of the Trinity 
who was actually the means of our redemption may be ascribed 
to that original relation of the Logos to the human race, by which 
He was both its Creator and its perfect exemplar. 2 But nothing 
can be farther from the truth than to imagine that His was all the 
love which saved us, the Father's all the wrath which condemned 
us. If the death of Christ was necessary to propitiate the wrath 
of the Father, it was necessary to propitiate His own wrath also ; 
if it manifested His love, it manifested the Father's love also. 
The absolute, unbroken unity of will between the Father and the 
Son is the secret of the atoning sacrifice. 

Again, the isolation of the truth of the Atonement from other 
parts of Christian doctrine has led to a mode of stating it which 
deprives us of all motive to action, of all responsibility for our own 
salvation. Just as .the misconception noticed above arose from a 
failure to grasp the whole truth of our Lord's Divinity, so this 
error springs from ignoring His perfect Humanity. Christ _ is 
regarded as having no vital or real relation to us, and His work 
is therefore wholly external, a mere gift from above. But what 
has already been said will show that from the first the Atonement 
has been taught as the offering of our spiritual Head, in Whom 
we are redeemed, and whose example we are able to follow as 
having Him in us. Salvation is thus given to us indeed, but it 
is given to us because we are in Christ, and we have to work out 
our share in it because of the responsibility, the call to sacrifice, 

1 This is well stated by McLeod Campbell, 1. c., p. 16. 

2 Cf. Athan., de Inc., passim, esp. chs. 20 and 42 Hooker, Eccles. Pol., 
V. li. 3 : ' It seemeth a thing unconsonant that the world should honor any 
other as the Saviour but Him Whom it honoreth as the Creator of the 
world.' 



vii. The Atonement. 257 

which that union with Him lays upon us. ' Work out your own 
salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God which worketh in 
you both to will and to do.' It is all from God and of God ; but 
God has come into our life, and taken us up into Him, and called 
upon us to follow Him in the way of the cross. 

And this leads us to consider another error, or rather another 
form of the same error. Nothing is more common than to hear 
the doctrine of Atonement stated as if the work of Christ consisted 
in His endurance of our punishment in order that we might not 
endure it. This view of the doctrine leads to the objections — 
perhaps the commonest of all the difficulties found in what men 
take for Christianity — that the punishment of the innocent instead 
of the guilty is unjust, and that punishment cannot be borne by 
any one but the sinner. We have seen that the real vicariousness 
of our Lord's work lay in the offering of the perfect sacrifice : the 
theory we are now considering holds, on the contrary, that it lay 
in the substitution of His punishment for ours. A partial truth is 
contained in this theory ; for our Lord did endure sufferings, and, 
as has been already said, the)'- were the very sufferings which are, 
in sinners, the penalties of sin. But as a simple matter of fact 
and experience, the sufferings and the pains of death which He 
endured have not been remitted to us ; and that which is rdi ; tted, 
the eternal penalty of alienation from God, was not, could nG be 
endured by Him. For alienation from God is, essentially, a st.\te 
of sin ; it is sin, regarded both in its origin and in its necessary 
result. It could not, therefore, be borne by Christ, 'in Whom 
was no sin,' between Whom and the Father was no alienation. 
Attempts have been made to establish a quantitative relation 
between our Lord's sufferings and the punishment which is thereby 
remitted to us, to prove that the eternal nature of the Sufferer 
made His death equivalent to eternal punishment. But even if 
such attempts, in so mysterious a region, could succeed, it would 
be vain to establish a quantitative equivalence where there is no 
qualitative relation. Eternal punishment is ' eternal sin,' 1 and as 
such could never be endured by the sinless Son of God. 

But we have to face the question which naturally follows. 
What, then, did His sufferings and death mean ? Why did He 
endure what are to us the temporal penalties, the diverse conse- 
quences of sin? And if He endured them, why are they not 
remitted to us? It is true, as has been shown, that He bore just 
those sufferings which are the results and penalties of sin, even to 

1 Cf. the true reading of St. Mark lii. 29, R. V. 
17 



258 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

that tremendous final experience in which man loses sight of God 
as he enters the valley of the shadow of death ; but He bore them, 
not that we might be freed from them, for we have deserved them, 
but that we might be enabled to bear them, as He did, victoriously 
and in unbroken union with God. He, the Innocent, suffered, 
but the guilty do not ' go free ; ' for the very end and object of 
all the obedience that He learnt was, that He might lead man 
along the same path of suffering, not ' free,' but gladly submissive 
to the pains, which, but for Him, would be the overwhelming 
penalties of our sins. It may be true that ' punishment cannot 
be borne by any one but the sinner,' 1 and therefore it may be right 
not to call Christ's sufferings punishment, especially as the expres- 
sion is significantly avoided in the New Testament. But it is 
certainly not true that the sufferings which result from sin cannot 
be borne by any one but the sinner : every day demonstrates the 
falsity of such an assertion. Sufferings borne in the wrong spirit, 
unsubmissively or without recognition of their justice, are penal ; 
but the spirit of humility and obedience makes them remedial and 
purgatorial. Christ, by so bearing the pains which sin brought 
upon human nature, and which the special sin of His enemies 
heaped upon Him, has not only offered the one perfect sacrifice, 
but has also given us strength to make the same submission, to 
learn the same obedience, and to share the same sacrifice. 

IV. There are many topics connected with the Atonement 
which it is impossible here to discuss, but which seem to fall into 
their right place and proportion if those aspects of Christ's redeem- 
ing work which have been dwelt upon are kept firmly in mind. 
The central mystery of the cross, the forgiveness, the removal of 
wrath, thereby freely bestowed upon us, remains a mystery, and 
must always be an insuperable difficulty to those who depend 
wholly on reason, or who trust wholly in man's power to extricate 
himself from the destruction wrought by his sin, as it was an 
offence to the Jew, and foolishness to the Greek. But mystery 
though it is to the intellect, there is a moral fitness 2 in the bestowal 
of forgiveness because of the obedience of Christ shown in His 
sacrificial death, which appeals irresistibly to the moral conscious- 
ness of mankind. The witness of this is the trustful gratitude with 
which the doctrine of Christ crucified has been accepted by 

1 W. R. Greg. 

2 It should be noticed that the Greek Fathers and the English divines for 
the most part confine themselves to showing this moral fitness and conso- 
nance with God's moral nature in the Atonement, and do not attempt to 
prove its absolute necessity. Cf. Athanasius, de Incarn. Verbi, ch. 6 ; 
Hooker, Eccles. Pol., V. li. 3; Butler, Analogy, pt. ii. c. 5. 



vii. The Atonement. 259 

Christians, learned and unlearned, from the age of its first preach- 
ing. The human heart accepts it, and by the cross is assured of 
forgiveness : * to them which are called ' it is ' Christ the power of 
God, and the wisdom of God.' 

But if we may appeal to experience in support of this mysterious 
truth, much more may we claim the same support for the plainer, 
more human aspect of the Atonement. As St. Athanasius in his 
day, 1 so we in ours may appeal for the practical and visible proof 
of the Atonement, to the complete change in man's relation to 
sorrow and suffering, and in the Christian view of death. 2 This is 
no small matter. When we realize what suffering is in human life, 
the vast place which it has in our experience, its power of absorbing 
the mind, its culmination in the final pangs of death, and when we 
see the transformation, however gradual and imperfect it may be, 
of all this into the means and material of the sacrifice which the 
follower of Christ is gladly willing to offer to the Father of our Lord 
Jesus Christ, we realize the full force of the great words telling of 
the destruction 'through death of him that had the power of death, 
that is the devil,' and of the deliverance of ' them who through fear 
of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.' And the trans- 
formation, the destruction, the deliverance, consist in this, that from 
these sufferings His sacrifice has removed the element of rebellion, 
the hopelessness of alienation, the sting of sin. They are ours, 
because they were His ; but they are ours as they were His, purified 
and perfected by obedience, by the offering of a holy Will ; ' by the 
which Will we are sanctified through the offering of the body of 
Jesus Christ once for all.' 

1 Cf. De Incarn. Verbi, chs. 27, 28, 29. 

2 Cf. Carlyle's apostrophe to Marie Antoinette on her way to the scaffold : 
'Think of Him Whom thou worshippest, the Crucified, — Who also treading 
the winepress alone, fronted sorrow still deeper ; and triumphed over it, and 
made it Holy, and built of it a " Sanctuary of Sorrow " for thee and all the 
wretched.' — Miscellaneous Essays , vol. v. p. 165 (ed. 1872). 



VIII. 

THE HOLY SPIRIT AND INSPIRATION. 



CHARLES GORE. 



VIII. 
THE HOLY SPIRIT AND INSPIRATION. 

I. The appeal to ' experience ' in religion, whether personal or 
genera], brings before the mind so many associations of ungoverned 
enthusiasm and untrustworthy fanaticism that it does not easily 
commend itself to those of us who are most concerned to be reas- 
onable. And yet, in one form or another, it is an essential part 
of the appeal which Christianity makes on its own behalf since the 
day when Jesus Christ met the question, ' Art thou He that should 
come, or do we look for another? ' by pointing to the transforming 
effect of His work : ' The blind receive their sight, and the lame 
walk ; the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear ; the dead are 
raised up, and the poor have the Gospel preached to them.' 

The fact is that in current appeals to experience the fault, where 
there is a fault, lies not in the appeal but in the nature of the 
experience appealed to. What is meant by the term is often an 
excited state of feeling, rather than a permanent transformation of 
the whole moral, intellectual, and physical being of man. Or it 
is something which seems individual and eccentric, or something 
confined to a particular class of persons under special conditions 
of education or of ignorance, or something which other religions 
besides Christianity have been conspicuous for producing. When 
a meaning broad and full, and at the same time exact enough, 
has been given to experience, the appeal is essential to Chris- 
tianity, because Christianity professes to be not a mere record of 
the past, but a present life, and there is no life where there is no 
experience. 

It will be worth while, then, to bear in mind how freely the 
original defenders of the Christian Church appealed, like their 
Master, to facts of experience. Thus we find an individual, like 
St. Cyprian, recalling the time of his baptism, and the personal 
experience of illumination and power which it brought with it : 

' Such were my frequent musings : for whereas I was encumbered 
with the many sins of my past life, which it seemed impossible to 



264 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

be rid of, so I had used myself to give way to my clinging infirm- 
ities, and, from despair of better things, to humor the evils of my 
heart, as slaves born in my house, and my proper offspring. But 
after that life-giving water succored me, washing away the stain 
of former years, and pouring into my cleansed and hallowed breast 
the light which comes from heaven, after that I drank in the 
Heavenly Spirit, and was created into a new man by a second 
birth, — then marvellously what before was doubtful became plain 
to me, what was hidden was revealed, what was dark began to 
shine, what was before difficult now had a way and a means, what 
had seemed impossible now could be achieved, what was in me of 
the guilty flesh now confessed that it was earthy, what was quickened 
in me by the Holy Ghost now had a growth according to God.' * 

Again, we find an apologist like St. Athanasius resting the stress 
of his argument on behalf of Christ upon what He has done in the 
world, and specially on the spiritual force He exercises on masses 
of men, ' drawing them to religion, persuading them to virtue, 
teaching them immortality, leading them to the desire of heavenly 
things, revealing the knowledge of the Father, inspiring power over 
death, showing each man to himself, abolishing the godlessness of 
idolatry.' 2 

The Fathers of the Christian Church appealed in this way to 
experience, because Christianity, as they knew, is essentially not a 
past event, but a present life, a life first manifested in Christ, and 
then perpetuated in His Church. Christianity is a manifested life, 
— a thing, therefore, like all other forms of life, known not in itself, 
but in its effects, its fruits, its results. Christianity is a manifested 
life, and it is this because it is the sphere in which the Spirit, the 
Life-giver, finds His freest and most unhindered activity. The 
Christian Church is the scene of the intensest, the most vigorous, 
the richest, the most ' abundant ' life that the universe knows, 
because in a pre-eminent sense it is the ' Spirit-bearing body.' The 
Spirit is life ; that is His chief characteristic. We may indeed eluci- 
date the idea of spirit by negations ; by negation of materiality, of 
circumscription, of limitation : but the positive conception we are 
to attach to spirit is the conception of life ; and where life is most 
penetrating, profound, invincible, rational, conscious of God, there 
in fullest freedom of operation is the Holy Spirit. 3 

1 Cyprian, ad Donatum, 3. Trans, in Library of the Fathers, iii. 3. 

2 Athanasius, de Incarnatione, 31, 48-52. 

3 See St. Basil's fine definition of the term in his treatise On the Holy 
Spirit, ix. 22. This treatise has been translated by the Rev. G. Lewis for 
the Religious Tract Society. 



viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 265 

Thus, obviously enough, the doctrine of the Spirit is no remote 
or esoteric thing ; it is no mere ultimate object of the rapt con- 
templation of the mystic ; it is the doctrine of that wherein God 
touches man most nearly, most familiarly, in common life. Last in 
the eternal order of the Divine Being, ' proceeding from the Father 
and the Son/ the Holy Spirit is the first point of contact with God 
in the order of human experience. 1 

' I believe in the Holy Ghost, the giver of life.' All life is His 
operation. ' Wherever the Holy Spirit is, there is also life ; and 
wherever life is, there is also the Holy Spirit.' 2 Thus if creation 
takes its rise in the will of the Father, if it finds its law in the being 
of the Word or Son, yet the effective instrument of creation, the 
'finger of God,' the moving principle of vitalization is the Holy 
Spirit, 'the divider and distributor of the gifts of life.' 3 

Nature is one great body, and there is breath in the body ; but 
this breath is not self-originated life, it is the influence of the 
Divine Spirit. ' By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, 
and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth.' The Spirit, 
the breath of God, was brooding upon the face of the waters of 
chaos ere life and order were. It is the sending forth of the breath 
of God, which is the giving to things of the gift of life ; it is the 
withdrawal of that breath which is their annihilation. 4 So keenly, 
indeed, were the Christians of the early period conscious of the one 
life of nature as the universal evidence of the one Spirit, that it 
was a point of the charge against Origen that his language seemed 
to involve an exclusion of the Holy Spirit from nature, and a limi- 
tation of His activity to the Church. 5 The whole of life is certainly 
His. And yet, because His special attribute is holiness, it is in 
rational natures, which alone are capable of holiness, that He exerts 

1 See Basil, as above, xvi. yj : ' We must not suppose because the Apostle 
(1 Cor. xii. 4) mentions the Spirit first, and the Son second, and God the 
Father third, that the order at the present day has been quite reversed. For 
he made his beginning from our end of the relation: for it is by receiving 
the gifts that we come in contact with the Distributor ; then we come to con- 
sider the Sender ; then we carry back our thought to the Fount and Cause 
of the good things/ Cf. xviii. 47 : 'The way of the knowledge of God is 
from one Spirit, by the one Son, to the one Father ; and reversely, the nat- 
ural goodness of God, His holiness of nature, His royal rank taking their 
rise from the Father, reach the Spirit though the Only- begotten.' 

2 Ambrose, de Spiritu Sancto, i. 15, 172. 

3 So irenaeus, Cyril of Jerusalem, Athanasius, Basil, Didymus, Victori- 
nus, express the relation of the Divine Persons in Creation. 

4 Ps. xxxiii. 6 ; Gen. i. 2 ; Ps. civ. 29, 30. 

5 Huet. Origeniana, L. ii., Qu. i. 2, c. xxvii. Cf. Athan., Epp. ad Seiapion., 
i. 23-31 ; iv. 9-12. 



266 The Religion of the Incarnate 



071. 



His special influence. A special in-breathing of the Divine Spirit 
gave to man his proper being. 1 In humanity, made after the 
Divine Image, it was the original intention of God that the Spirit 
should find His chiefest joy, building the edifice of a social life in 
which nature was to find its crown and justification ; a life of con- 
scious and free sonship, in which the gifts of God should be not 
only received, but recognized as His, and consciously used in will- 
ing and glad homage to the Divine Giver, in reverent execution of 
the. law of development impressed by the Divine Reason, in the 
realized fellowship of the Blessed Spirit of knowledge and love. 
The history of humanity has in fact been a development, but a 
development the continuity of which is most apparent in that 
department in which man appears simply as the child of nature, 
the most perfect and interesting of her products, consciously adapt- 
ing himself to his environment and moulded by it. This indeed 
has been so much the case that the facts of the history of civiliza- 
tion have been used, at least plausibly, as an argument against our 
race really possessing moral freedom at all. Such a use of the facts 
is, we recognize, not justifiable. It leaves out of consideration 
some of the most striking elements in human history, and some of 
the most certain facts of human consciousness. But the very 
plausibleness of the argument is suggestive. It means that com- 
paratively very few men have been at pains to realize their true 
freedom ; that men in masses have been dominated by the mere 
forces of nature ; or, in other words, that human history presents 
broadly the record of a one-sided, a distorted development. For 
man was not meant for merely natural evolution, mere self-adapta- 
tion to the ' things that are seen.' The consciousness that he was 
meant for something higher has tinged his most brilliant physical 
successes, his greatest triumphs of civilization and art, with the bit- 
terness of remorse, the misery of conscious lawlessness. 

Our race was created for conscious fellowship with God, for son- 
ship, for the life of spirit. And it is just in this department that its 
failure has been most conspicuous. It is here that the Divine 
Spirit has found His chiefest disappointment. Everywhere He has 
found rebellion, — not everywhere without exception, for ' in every 
age entering into holy souls, He has made them sons of God and 
prophets ; ' but everywhere in such a general sense that sin in fact 
and in its consequences covers the whole region of humanity. In 
the highest department of created life, where alone lawlessness was 
possible, because what was asked for was the co-operation of free 

1 Gen. ii. 7. 



viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 267 

service to carry out a freely accepted ideal, 1 — there alone is the 
record of lawlessness, the record of the Spirit striving with man, 
but resisted, rejected, ignored, quenched. Thus the word, which 
in fact most forcibly characterizes man's spiritual history, so far as 
it has been according to the mind of God, is not progress, but 
recovery, or redemption. It is not natural, but supernatural, — 
supernatural, that is, in view of the false nature which man made 
for himself by excluding God. Otherwise the work of redemption 
is only the reconstitution of the nature which God designed. It ib j 
the recovery within the limits of a chosen race and by a deliberate 
process of limitation, of a state of things which had been intended 
to be universal 2 The ' elect ' represent not the special purpose of 
God for a few, but the universal purpose which under the circum- 
stances can only be realized through a few. The hedging in of 
the few, the drawing of the lines so close, the method of exclusion 
again and again renewed all down the history of redemption, repre- 
sents the love of the Divine Spirit ever baffled in the mass, pre- 
serving the truth of God in a 'remnant,' an elect body; who 
themselves escaping the corruption which is in the world, become 
in their turn a fresh centre from which the restorative influence can 
flow out upon mankind. Rejected in the world, He secures for 
Himself a sphere of operations in the Jews, isolating Abraham, 
giving the law for a hedge, keeping alive in the nation the sense of 
its vocation by the inspiration of prophets. Again and again 
baffled in the body of the Jewish nation, He falls back upon the 
faithful remnant, and keeps alive in them that prospective sonship 
which was meant to be the vocation of the whole nation ; some- 
times in narrower, sometimes in broader channels, the purpose of 
love moves on till the Spirit finds in the Son of Man, the Anointed 
One, the perfect realization of the destiny of man, the manhood in 
which He can freely and fully work : ' He came down upon the Son 
of God, made son of man, accustoming Himself in His case to 
dwell in the human race, and to repose in man, and to dwell in 
God's creatures, working out in them the will of the Father, and 
recovering them from their old nature into the newness of Christ' 3 
In Christ humanity is perfect, because in Him it retains no part of 
that false independence which, in all its manifold forms, is the 
secret of sin. In Christ humanity is perfect and complete, in 
ungrudging and unimpaired obedience to the movement of the 
Divine Spirit, Whose creation it was, Whose organ it gave itself to 

1 Athan., de Incarn., xliii, 3. 2 Athan., 1. c, xliii. 4. 

3 Iren., c. Haer., iii. 17, 1. 



268 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

be. The Spirit anoints Him ; the Spirit drives Him in to the wil- 
derness ; the Spirit gives Him the law of His mission ; in the 
power of the Spirit He works His miracles ; in the Holy Spirit He 
lifts up the voice of human thankfulness to the Divine Father ; in 
the Spirit He offers Himself without spot to God ; in the power of 
the Spirit He is raised from the dead. 1 All that perfect human life 
had been a life of obedience, of progressive obedience, a gradual 
learning in each stage of experience what obedience meant ; 2 it had 
been a life of obedience which became propitiatory as it bore loy- 
ally, submissively, lovingly, all the heritage of pain and misery in 
which sin in its long history had involved our manhood, all the 
agony of that insult and rejection in which sin revealed itself by 
antagonism to Him, — bore it, and by bearing it turned it into the 
material of His accepted sacrifice. He was obedient unto death. 
And because He thus made our human nature the organ of a life 
of perfect obedience, therefore He can go on to make that same 
humanity, freed from all the limitations of this lower world and 
glorified in the Spirit at the right hand of God, at once the organ 
of Divine supremacy over the universe of created things, and 
(itself become quickening Spirit) 3 the fount to all the sons of 
obedience and faith of its own life. Christ is the second Adam, 
who having ' recapitulated the long development of humanity into 
Himself/ 4 taken it up into Himself, that is, and healed its wounds 
and fructified its barrenness, gives it a fresh start by a new birth 
from Him. The Spirit coming forth at Pentecost out of His 
uplifted manhood, as from a glorious fountain of new life, 5 perpet- 
uates all its richness, its power, its fulness in the organized society 
which He prepared and built for the Spirit's habitation. The 
Church, His Spirit-bearing body, comes forth into the world, not 
as the exclusive sphere of the Spirit's operations, for ' that breath 
bloweth where it listeth ; ' 6 but as the special and covenanted 
sphere of His regular and uniform operation, the place where He 
is pledged to dwell and to work ; the centre marked out and 
hedged in, whence ever and again proceeds forth anew the work 

1 St. Mark i. 10, 12. St. Luke iv. 1, 18 ; x. 21. St. Matt. xii. 28. Heb. 
ix. 14. Rom. viii. 11. (These two last passages at least imply the action of 
the Holy Spirit in the Sacrifice and Resurrection of Christ.) 

2 Heb. v. 7-10. Phil. ii. 8. 

3 1 Cor. xv. 45, ' The last Adam became a life-giving Spirit.' St. John vi. 
63, ' Spirit and Life.' 

4 Iren., iii. 18, 1, and frequently elsewhere. 

5 Iren., iii. 24, 1. 

6 St. John iii. 4. The intention of this passage is to express not that the 
Spirit is lawless in His operations, but that He is beyond our control. 



viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 269 

of human recovery ; the home where, in spite of sin and imper- 
fection, is ever kept alive the picture of what the Christian life is, 
that is, of what common human life is meant to be and can 
become. 

Of the work of the Holy Spirit in the Church we may note four 
characteristics. 

1. It is social. It treats man as a ' social being' who cannot 
realize himself in isolation. For no other reason than because 
grace is the restoration of nature, 1 the true, the redeemed humanity 
is presented to us as a society or Church. This is apparent with 
reference to either of the gifts which summarize the essence of the 
Church's life, grace, or truth. Sacraments are the ordained instru- 
ments of grace, and sacraments are in one of their aspects social 
ceremonies — of incorporation, or restoration, or bestowal of au- 
thority, or fraternal sharing of the bread of life. They presuppose 
a social organization. Those who have attempted to explain why 
there should be in the Church an Apostolic succession of ministers, 
have seen the grounds of such appointment in the necessity for 
preserving in a catholic society, which lacks the natural links of 
race or language or common habitation, a visible and obligatory 
bond of association. 2 

The same fact appears in reference to the truth, the knowledge 
of God and of the true nature and needs of man, which constitutes 
one main part of the Christian life. That too is no mere individual 
illumination. It is 'a rule of faith,' an l apostolic tradition,' 'a 
pattern of sound words,' embodied in Holy Scripture and perpetu- 
ated in a teaching Church, within the scope of which each indi- 
vidual is to be brought to have his mind and conscience fashioned 
by it, normally from earliest years. It would be going beyond the 
province of this essay to stop to prove that from the beginnings of 
the Christian life, a man was understood to become a Christian and 
receive the benefits of redemption, by no other means than incor- 
poration into the Christian society. 

2. But none the less on account of this social method the Spirit 
nourishes individuality. The very idea of the Spirit's gift is that of 
an intenser life. Intenser life is more individualized life, for our 
life becomes richer and fuller only by the intensification of perso- 
nality and character. Thus Christianity has always trusted to 
strongly marked character as the means by which religion is propa- 
gated. It does not advance as an abstract doctrine, but by the 

1 Aug., de Spiritu et Littera, xxvii. 47, ' Grace is not the negation of 
nature, but its restoration.' 

2 Raymund of Sabunde, Theol. Nat., tit. 303. 



270 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

subtle, penetrating influences of personality. It is the illuminated 
man who becomes a centre of illumination. ' As clear transparent 
bodies if a ray of light fall on them become radiant themselves and 
diffuse their splendor all around, so souls illuminated by the in- 
dwelling Spirit are rendered spiritual themselves and impart their 
grace to others.' x Thus, from the first, Christianity has tended to 
intensify individual life in a thousand ways, and has gloried in the 
varieties of disposition and character which the full life of the Spirit 
develops. The Church expects to see the same variety of life in 
herself as she witnesses in Nature. 

' One and the same rain,' says St. Cyril of Jerusalem to his cate- 
chumens, ' comes down upon all the world, yet it becomes white in 
the lily, and red in the rose, and purple in the violets and pansies, 
and different and various in all the several kinds ; it is one thing in 
the palm-tree, and another in the vine, and all in all things. In 
itself, indeed, it is uniform and changes not, but by adapting itself 
to the nature of each thing that receives it, it becomes what is ap- 
propriate to each. Thus also the Holy Ghost, one and uniform 
and undivided in Himself, distributes His grace to every man as 
He wills. He employs the tongue of one man for wisdom ; the soul 
of another He enlightens by prophecy ; to another He gives power 
to drive away devils ; to another He gives to interpret the Divine 
Scriptures ; He invigorates one man's self-command ; He teaches 
another the way to give alms ; another He teaches to fast and train 
himself; another He trains for martyrdom ; diverse to different men, 
yet not diverse from Himself.' 2 

Nor was this belief in the differences of the Spirit's work a mere 
abstract theory. In fact the Church life of the early centuries did 
present an aspect of great variety : not only in the dispositions of 
individuals, for that will always be observable where human nature 
is allowed to subsist, but in the types of life and thought cultivated 
in different parts of the Church. Early in the life of Christianity 
did something like the Roman type of Catholicism show itself, but 
it showed itself as one among several types of ecclesiasticism, easily 
distinguishable from what Alexandria or Africa or Antioch nour- 
ished and produced. 

And what is true in the life of religion as a whole is true in the 

1 Basil, de Spiritu Sancto, ix. 23 (Lewis' translation). Cf. Newman's 
Univ. Sermons, ' Personal Influence the means of propagating the truth.' 

2 Cyril, Catech., xvi. 12. The attention to the differences of individual 
character is very noticeable in St. Basil's monastic rule ; see the Regulae 
fusius tractatse, resp. 19, and the Constit. Monast., 4. Also in the writings 
of Gregory of Nazianzus, Chrysostom, and Gregory the Great on the Pastoral 
Office. 



viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 271 

department of the intellect. Here again the authority of the col- 
lective society, the 'rule of faith' is meant to nourish and quicken, 
not to crush, individuality. Each individual Christian owes the 
profoundest ' deference to the common tradition. Thus to ' keep 
the traditions' is at all times, and not least in Scripture, a common 
Christian exhortation. But this common tradition is not meant to 
be a merely external law. It is meant to pass by the ordinary pro- 
cesses of education into the individual consciousness, and there, 
because it represents truth, to impart freedom. Thus St. Paul 
speaks of the developed Christian, ' the man who is spiritual,' as 
'judging all things and himself judged of none.' And St. John 
makes the ground of Christian certainty to lie not in an external 
authority, but in a personal gift : ' ye have an unction from the 
Holy One, and ye know all things; ' ' ye need not that any one 
teach you.' 1 There is then an individual ' inspiration,' 2 as well as 
an inspiration of the whole body, only this inspiration is not barely 
individual or separatist. As it proceeds out of the society, so it 
ends in it. It ends by making each person more individualized, 
more developed in personal characteristics, but for that very reason 
more conscious of his own incompleteness, more ready to recognize 
himself as only one member of the perfect Manhood. 

The idea of authority is in fact a perfectly simple one. It never 
received better expression than by Plato when he describes it as 
the function of the society by a carefully regulated education to 
implant right instincts, right affections and antipathies, in the grow- 
ing mind of the child, at a time when he cannot know the reason 
of things ; in order that as the mind develops it may recognize 
the right reason of things by a certain inner kinship, and welcome 
truth as a friend. 3 Authority, according to such a view of it, is a 
necessary schooling of the individual temperament. Thus, we are 
told that in the judgment of the philosopher Hegel, 'The basis 
of sound education was . . . the submission of the mind to an 
external lesson, which must be learnt by every one, and even 
learnt by rote, with utter disregard of individual tastes and desires ; 
only out of this self-abnegation, and submission to be guided and 
taught, could any originality spring which was worth preserving.' 4 
In fact, we all recognize the necessity for such external discipline 
in all departments. Few people like good art, for instance, at 
first. Probably they are attracted by what is weak but arrests 

1 1 Cor. ii. 15. 1 St. John ii. 20-27. 

2 Clement Alex., Strom., v. 13, 88. 

3 Republic, 401 D, 402 A. 

4 Caird's Hegel (Blackwood's Philosophical Classics), p. 72. 



272 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

attention by obvious and superficial merits. The standards which 
artistic authority has erected, the accepted canons of good taste 
and judgment, do not commend themselves at first as right or 
natural. But modest and well-disposed people take it for granted 
at starting that the orthodox judgment will turn out to be right ; 
and they set themselves to school to learn why the artists and 
poets of great name are great, till their own judgment becomes 
enlightened, and they understand what at first they took on trust. 
It' was the instinctive perception of this function of authority which, 
made the Church insist so much on the principle 'credo ut intel- 
ligam.' The Creed represents the catholic judgment, the highest 
knowledge of God and the spiritual life granted to man by the 
Divine Revelation. Let a man put himself to school in the Church 
with reverence and godly fear, and his own judgment will become 
enlightened. He will come to say, with St. Anselm, ' I give Thee 
thanks, good Lord ; because what first I believed by Thy gift, I 
now understand by Thy illumination.' x 

Such an idea of authority leaves much for the individual to do. 
It is the reaction of the individual on the society which is to keep 
the common tradition pure and unnarrowed. The Church has in 
Holy Scripture the highest expression of the mind of Christ. The 
familiarity of all its members with this flawless and catholic image 
is to ward off in each generation that tendency to deteriorate and 
to become materialized which belongs to all 'traditions.' The 
individual illumination is thus to react as a purifying force upon the 
common mind of the Christian society. The individual Christian 
is to pay the debt of his education, by himself ' testing all things, 
and holding fast that which is good.' Specially gifted individuals 
from time to time will be needed to effect more or less sudden 
' reversions to type,' to the undying type of Apostolic teaching. 2 
But such a true reformer is quite distinct in idea from the heretic. 
He reforms ; he does not innovate. His note is to restore ; not 

1 Anselm, Proslog., 4 ; he adds : ' So that even if I were unwilling to 
believe that Thou art, I could not cease to understand it.' But the whole 
relation of authority and reason is most completely grasped and stated by 
St. Augustine; see Cunningham, St. Austin (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1886), 
pp. 9, 157 ff. 

2 Dr. Salmon, Infallibility, p. 115, has a clever comparison of the authority 
of the Church to that of the town clock. The value we assign to having such 
an authoritative standard of the right time does not prevent our recognizing 
the importance of having it regulated. ' And if we desired to remove an 
error which had accumulated during a long season of neglect, it would be 
very unfair to represent us as wishing to silence the clock, or else as wish- 
ing to allow every townsman to get up and push the hands backwards and 
forwards as he pleased.' 



viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 273 

to reject. And the absence of necessity for fundamental rejection 
comes from this simple fact, that the Christian Creed is rational 
and true. If any man comes to us and says that he has studied 
and assimilated the Christian Creed with all the care and reverence 
in his ability, and has rejected it because he finds it irrational and 
false, we cannot complain of him. 1 We cannot ask him to accept 
it though he thinks it false. We do not at all complain of his 
having inquired and thought freely — only we venture to assure 
him, with a confidence which can hardly fail to be irritating, 
because it is confident, that he is mistaken, that he has thought 
not only freely, but erroneously. When Christianity adopts, as in 
the modern Romanist system, a different tone, proscribing free 
inquiry as 'rationalistic,' and making the appeal to antiquity a 
' treason and a heresy,' 2 it is abjuring its own rational heritage, and 
adopting a method which Charles Kingsley had good reason to 
call Manichsean. It is the test of the Church's legitimate tenure 
that she can encourage free inquiry into her title-deeds. 

3. Thirdly, the Spirit claims for His own, and consecrates the 
whole of nature. One Spirit was the original author of all that is ; 
and all that exists is in its essence very good. It is only sin which 
has produced the appearance of antagonism between the Divine . 
operation and human freedom, or between the spiritual and the 
material. Thus the humanity of Christ, which is the Spirit's per- 
fect work, exhibits in its perfection how every faculty of human 
nature, spiritual and physical, is enriched and vitalized, not annihi- 
lated, by the closest conceivable interaction of the Divine Energy. 
This principle as carried out in the Church, occupies a prominent 
place in the earliest theology ; in part because Montanism, with its 
pagan idea of inspiration, as an ecstasy which deprived its subject 
of reason, gave the Church an opportunity of emphasizing that 
the fullest action of the Spirit, in the case of her inspired men, 
intensified and did not supersede their own thought, judgment, and 
individuality ; still more because Gnostic dualism, turning every 
antithesis of nature and grace, of spirit and flesh, of natural and 
supernatural, into an antagonism, forced upon the Church the 
assertion of her own true and comprehensive Creed. That every- 
thing in Christianity is realized ' in flesh as in spirit ' is the con- 
stantly reiterated cry of St. Ignatius, who of all men was most 
'spiritual.' That the spiritual is not the immaterial, that we 
become spiritual not by any change or curtailment of nature; not 

1 But cf. pp. 163-165, 19T-194, 214-216. 

2 Manning, Temporal Mission of the Holv Ghost, third edit., pp. 9, 29, 
238-240. 

18 



274 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

by any depreciation or ignoring of the body, is the constantly 
asserted principle of St. Irenseus. 1 And the earliest writers in 
general emphasize the visible organization of the Church, and the 
institution of external sacraments, as negations of the false prin- 
ciple which would sunder nature from God, and repudiate the 
unity of the material and the spiritual which the Word had been 
made Flesh in order to reveal and to perpetuate. 

4. But the unity of the spirit and the flesh, of faith and experi- 
ence, of God and the world, is certainly not an accomplished fact. 
On the contrary, dualism is always making appeals which strike 
home to our present experience. Thus if the Church was to main- 
tain the unity of all things, it could only be by laying great stress 
upon the ravages which sin had wrought, and upon the gradual- 
ness of the Spirit's method in recovery. The Old Testament, for 
example, presented a most unspiritual appearance. Its material 
sacrifices, its low standard of morals, its worldliness, were con- 
stantly being objected to by the Gnostic and Manichsean sects, 
who could not tolerate the Old Testament canon. ' But you are 
ignoring,' the Church replied, ' the gradualness of the Spirit's 
method.' He lifts man by little and little, He condescends to 
man's infirmity ; He puts up with him as he is, if only He can at 
the last bring him back to God. 

It is of the essence of the New Testament, as the religion of 
the Incarnation, to be final and catholic : on the other hand, it is 
of the essence of the Old Testament to be imperfect, because it 
represents a gradual process of education by which man was lifted 
out of depths of sin and ignorance. That this is the case, and 
that in consequence the justification of the Old Testament method 
lies not in itself at any particular stage, but in its result taken as a 
whole, is a thought very familiar to modern Christians. 2 But it is 
important to make plain that it was a thought equally familiar to 

1 See, for instance, c. Haer., v. 10, 2. ' The wild olive does not change its 
substance [when it is grafted in, see Rom. xi. 17], but only the quality of 
its fruit, and takes a new name, no longer being called an oleaster, but an 
olive ; so also man when he is by faith grafted in, and receives the Spirit of 
God, does not lose his fleshly substance, but changes the quality of the 
works which are his fruits, and takes another name indicating his improved 
condition, and is no longer described as flesh and blood, but as a spiritual 
man.' So also v. 6, 1, 'whom the Apostle calls "spiritual" because they 
have the Spirit, not because they have been robbed of the flesh and become 
bare spirit.' It is the recognition of this principle that makes most of the 
language of the Fathers on fasting so healthy and sensible. The end of 
fasting is not to destroy the flesh, but to free the spirit. 

2 See especially Mozley's Lectures on the Old Testament, x. : ' The end 
the test of progressive revelation.' 






vin. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 275 

the Fathers of the Christian Church. Thus St. Gregory of Nazi- 
anzus, speaking of God's dealings with the Jews of old, describes 
how, in order to gain the co-operation of man's good will in work- 
ing for his recovery, He dealt ' after the manner of a schoolmaster 
or a physician, and while curtailing part of their ancestral customs, 
tolerated the rest, making some concession to their tastes, just as 
physicians make their medicines palatable that they may be taken 
by their patients. For men do not easily abandon what long 
custom has consecrated. Thus the first law, while it abolished 
their idols, tolerated their sacrifices ; the second, while it abolished 
their sacrifices, allowed them to be circumcised : then when once 
they had accepted the removal of what was taken from them, they 
went further and gave up what had been conceded to them, — in 
the first case their sacrifices, in the second their practice of circum- 
cision, — and they became instead of heathens, Jews, instead of 
Jews, Christians, being betrayed as it were by gradual changes into 
acceptance of the Gospel.' x Again, St. Chrysostom explains how 
it is the very merit of the Old Testament that it has taught us to 
think things intolerable, which under it were tolerated. ' Do not 
ask,' he says, ' how these [Old Testament precepts] can be good, 
now when the need for them is past : ask how they were good 
when the period required them. Or rather, if you wish, do inquire 
into their merit even now. It is still conspicuous, and lies in 
nothing so much as what now enables us to find fault with them. 
Their highest praise is that we now see them to be defective. If 
they had not trained us well, so that we became susceptible of 
higher things, we should not have now seen their deficiency.' 
Then he shows how under the old law swearing by the true God 
was allowed, to avoid swearing by idols, the worse ill. 'But is not 
swearing at all of the evil one ? ' he asks. ' Undoubtedly, now, 
after this long course of training, but then not. And how can the 
same thing be good at one time, and bad at another? I ask rather, 
how should it not be so, when we have regard to the plain teaching 
of the fact of growth in all things, fruits of the earth or acquirements 
of man ? Look at man's own nature ; the food, the occupations 
which suit his infancy, are repulsive to his manhood. Or consider 
facts of history. All agree that murder is an invention of Satan, 

1 Greg. Naz., Orat. xxxi. 25. Many of the greatest of the ancient Christian 
writers depreciate the sacrificial .law as a mere concession made to avoid 
worse things, when the incident of the calf showed that the first legislation 
of the Ten Commandments was too spiritual; so Jerome in Isai. i. 12, in 
Jer. vii 21. Cf. Justin, Trypho, 19. Chrys., adv. Jud., iv. 6. Epiphan., Haer., 
lxvi. 71. Constt. ap., i. 6; vi. 20. This method of interpretation is perhaps 
derived from the Epistle of Barnabas, 2-4. 



276 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

yet this very act at a suitable time made Phineas to be honored 
with the high priesthood. Phineas' murder " was reckoned to him 
for righteousness." Just in the same way Abraham obtained an 
even higher honor for being not a murderer only, but what was 
much worse, a child-murderer. We must not then look at the 
facts in themselves only, but investigate with attention the period 
also, the cause, the motive, the difference of persons, and all the 
attendant circumstances : so only can one get at the truth.' * 

Once more St. Basil : ' Surely it is absolutely infantile and worthy 
of a child who must be really fed on milk, to be ignorant of the 
great mystery of our salvation — that just as we received our 
earliest instruction, so, in exercising unto godliness and going on 
unto perfection, we were first trained by lessons easy to apprehend 
and suited to our intelligence. He Who regulates our lives deals 
with us as those who have been reared in darkness, and gradually 
accustoms our eyes to the light of truth. For He spares our 
weakness, and in the depth of the riches of His wisdom and the 
unsearchable judgments of His understanding adopts this gentle 
treatment, so well adapted to our needs, accustoming us first to 
see the shadow of objects, and to look at the sun's reflection in 
water, so that we may not be suddenly blinded by the exposure 
to the pure light. By parity of reasoning, the law being a shadow 
of things to come, and the typical teaching of the prophets, which 
is the truth darkly, have been devised as exercises for the eyes of 
the heart, inasmuch as it will be easy for us to pass from these to 
wisdom hidden in mystery.' 2 

In the same spirit was the Church's answer to the difficulties 
which facts of personal experience were constantly putting in the 
way of her claims. Churchmen were frequently seen to be vulgar, 
ignorant, imperfect, sinful. If, in spite of manifold evils existing 
within her, the Church could still appeal to her fruits, it must be 
by comparison with what was to be found elsewhere, or by taking 
in a large area for comparison, or by appealing to her special 
grounds of hope. In fact, what she represented was a hope, not 
a realization ; a tendency, not a result ; a life in process, not 
a ripened fruit. But then she claimed that this was God's way. 
' He loves us not as we are, but as we are becoming.' 3 Let but a 

1 Chrys., in Matth., Homil. xvii. 5-6 (slightly abbreviated). Cf. Libell. 
Faustin. et Marcellin., in Bibl. Vet. Patrum, torn. v. 657 d. 

2 On the Holy Spirit, xiv. 33 (Lewis' trans). 

3 Aug., de Trin., i. 10, 21. This principle alone gives a basis for the doc- 
trine of ' imputation ' so far as it is true. God deals with us, e. g. in absolu- 
tion, by anticipation of what is to come about in us, in Christ. 



viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiratio?i. 277 

man once lay hold of the life-giving principle of faith, and God 
sets a value on him, life has a promise for him, altogether out of 
proportion to present attainments. For God estimates him, in 
view of all the forces of a new life which are set loose to work 
upon him, and he can assure himself that the movement of 
recovery which he has begun to feel stirring within him will carry 
him on through eternal ages, beyond what he can ask or think. 

It is because of this gradualness of the Spirit's method that 
it lays so great a strain on human patience. The spiritually 
minded of all ages have tended to find the visible Church a very 
troubled and imperfect home. Most startling disclosures of the 
actual state of ecclesiastical disorder and moral collapse, may be 
gathered . out of the Christian Fathers. Thus to found a ' pure 
Church ' has been the instinct of impatient zeal since Tertullian's 
day. But the instinct has to be restrained, the visible Church has 
to be borne with, because it is the Spirit's purpose to provide a 
home for the training and improvement of the imperfect. ' Let 
both grow together unto the harvest. ' 'A bruised reed will He 
not break, and smoking flax will He not quench.' The Church 
must have her terms of communion, moral and intellectual ; this 
is essential to keep her fundamental principles intact, and to pre- 
vent her betraying her secret springs of strength and recovery. 
But short of this necessity she is tolerant. It is her note to be 
tolerant, morally and theologically. She is the mother, not the 
magistrate. No doubt her balanced duty is one difficult to ful- 
fil. At times she has been puritanical, at others morally lax ; at 
times doctrinally lax, at others rigid. But however well or ill she 
has fulfilled the obligations laid on her, this is her ideal. She 
is the guardian, the depository of a great gift, a mighty presence, 
which in its essence is unchanging and perfect, but is realized 
very imperfectly in her experience and manifested life. This is 
what St. Thomas Aquinas means when he says ' that to believe 
in the Church is only possible if we mean by it to believe in 
the Spirit vivifying the Church.' * The true self of the Church 
is the Holy Spirit ; but a great deal in the Church at any date does 
not belong to her true self, and is obscuring the Spirit's mind. 
Thus the treasure is in earthen vessels, it is sometimes a light hid 
under a bushel ; and the Church is the probation of faith, as well 
as its encouragement. 

It will not be out of place to conclude this review of the Spirit's 

method in the Church by calling attention to the emphasis which, 

from the first, Christians laid upon the fact that the animating 

principle both of their individual lives and of their society as a 

1 Thorn. Aq., Summa Theol., pars sec. sec, Qu. 1, Art. ix. 



278 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

whole, was nothing less than the Holy Spirit Himself. To know 
Him was (as against all the philosophical schools, and in a sense 
in which the same could not be said even of the Divine Word) 
their peculiar privilege, to possess Him their summary character- 
istic. Under the old covenant, and in all the various avenues of 
approach to the Church, men could be the subjects of the Spirit's 
guidance and could be receiving gifts from Him ; but the ' initi- 
ated ' Christian, baptized and confirmed, possessed not merely His 
gifts but Himself. He is in the Church, as the ' Vicar of Christ,' 
in Whose presence Christ Himself is with them. He is the con- 
secrator of every sacrament, and the substance of His own sacra- 
mental gifts. The services of ordained men indeed are required 
for the administration of sacraments, but as ministers simply of a 
Power higher than themselves, of a Personal Spirit Who indeed is 
invoked by their ministry, and pledges Himself to respond to their 
invocations, but never subjects Himself to their power. Therefore 
the unworthiness of the minister diminishes in no way the efficacy 
of the sacrament, or the reality of the gift given, because the min- 
istry of men neither creates the gift nor adds to or diminishes its 
force. He is the giver of the gift, and the gift He gives is the 
same to all. Only the meagreness of human faith and love 
restrains the largeness of His bounty and conditions the Thing 
received by the narrowness and variability of the faculty which 
receives it. According to our faith is it done to us, and where 
there is no faith and no love, there the grace is equally, in St. 
Augustine's phrase, present and profitless. 1 

II. In something of this way the early Christian writers — and 
it has seemed better to let them speak for us — teach the doctrine 
of the Holy Spirit. What they teach is grounded in part on actual 
experience, in part on the revelation of the being and action of 
God made once for all in the Person of Jesus Christ and recorded 
in the New Testament. On this mingled basis of experience and 
Holy Scripture they passed back from the doctrine of the Holy 

1 The above paragraph is a summary of expressions constantly met with 
in the Fathers. It is St. Ambrose who protests against the idea that the 
priest can be spoken of as having power over the Divine Things which he 
ministers ; see De Spiritu Sancto, praef. 18, lib. i. 11, 118 : ' Nostra sunt ser- 
vitia sed tua sacramenta. Neque enim humanae opis est divina conferre.' 
St. Augustine, among others, draws the distinction between gifts from the 
Spirit and the gift of Himself. Ep. cxciv. : ' Aliter adiuvat nondum inhabi- 
tans, aliter inhabitans : nam nondum inhabitans adiuvat ut sint fideles, 
inhabitans adiuvat iam fideles.' Didymus, de Spiritu Sancto 15, calls atten- 
tion to the distinction in the New Testament between irvevfia (without the 
article), i. e., 'a spiritual gift,' and rb -jruevfxa, i. e., the Spirit Himself; cf. 
Westcott on St. John vii. 39. 



viii. TJie Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 279 

Spirit as He is operative in the world, to the Theology of His 
Person. They passed back but slowly, with great hesitation, even 
unwillingness. Nothing, we may say, was further removed from 
the Fathers than the easy-going assumption that because we are 
the subjects of a revelation, therefore we are able to speculate with 
tolerably complete information about the mysteries which lie beyond 
experience. The truth that ' we know in part,' we see i in a glass 
darkly,' was profoundly impressed upon their minds. God mani- 
fested Himself, St. Gregory of Nazianzus tells, in such a way as to 
escape the nets of our syllogisms, and to show Himself superior 
to our logical distinctions. If we expect to find our logic equal to 
express Him, we show only our mad presumption, ' we who are not 
able even to know what lies at our feet, or to count the waves of 
the sea, or the drops of rain, or the days of the world, much less 
to fathom the depths of God, and give account of His nature, 
which transcends alike our reason and our power of expres- 
sion.* x Besides this, the early theologians realized the obliga- 
tion of keeping to Holy Scripture — of not being wise 'above 
that which is written ' — and they were conscious of the danger 
of building on isolated texts of Scripture or of treating its 
'simple and untechnical' language as if it was the language of 
a formal treatise. 2 

For these reasons they were cautious in theological speculation. 
Yet the facts and relationships introduced into the world of expe- 
rience by the revelation of the Son represent eternal realities, if 
under great limitations, yet still truly, and thus make possible a real 
security up to a certain point on what lies beyond the unassisted 
human knowledge. Thus, first, when the Arian movement passed 
from the denial of the true Godhead of Christ to a similar posi- 
tion with reference to the Holy Spirit, the Christian Church felt 
itself fully justified alike by its past traditions, 3 and by its 
Scriptures, in emphasizing the personal distinctness and the true 
Godhead of the Holy Spirit. Unless all Christ's language was 
an illusion, the Holy Spirit was really personal and really distinct 
from Himself and the Father ; nor could One who was associated 
with the Father and the Son in all the essentially Divine operations 
of nature and grace, be less than truly and really God, an essential 
element in the Eternal Being. The Arian controversy in its 

1 Greg. Naz., Orat. xxxi. 8. 

2 See Athan., Epp. ad Serapion, i. 17. Cyril Hieros., Cat., xvi. 24. 
Iren., v. 13, 2. Basil, de Spiritu Sancto, iii. 5. 

3 The Diet, of Chr. Biog., Art. ' Holy Ghost ' (by Dr. Swete), has an 
admirable summary of the theology of the subject. 



280 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

earlier stages had disposed of the notion that Christian theology 
could at any cost admit the conception of a created personality, 
clothed with Divine attributes and exercising Divine functions. 

Secondly, the consideration that the relations manifested in the 
Incarnation in terms of our experience between the Father, the 
Son, and the Holy Ghost, express transcendent and eternal rela- 
tions, led the Church to speak of the Holy Ghost as proceeding 
from the Father, as the unique fount of Godhead, through the 
Son: or in somewhat less nicely discriminated language 'from the 
Father and the Son.' l In the fifth century there is a tendency to 
use in the East the former, in the West the latter mode of expres- 
sion, but without any essential difference. Nor can it be said that 
the causes which were at work later to divide the Eastern and 
the Western Churches on the subject of the procession of the 
Holy Ghost, were so much really theological as ecclesiastical and 
political. 

Thirdly, the accurate consideration of the language in which is 
expressed the relation of Christ to the Holy Spirit, helped the 
Church to guard the doctrine of the Trinity from the associations of 
Tritheism. For the coming of the Holy Spirit is clearly spoken 
of in Holy Scripture as coincident with and involving the coming 
of Christ. 'While we are illuminated by the Holy Spirit, it is 
Christ Who illuminates us ; when we drink in the Spirit, it is Christ 
we drink.' The Spirit is distinct from Christ, — ' another Para- 
clete,' — yet in His coming, Christ comes; in His indwelling is 
the indwelling of the Father and the Son.' 2 How can this be? 
Because the ' Persons ' of the Holy Trinity are not to be thought of 
as distinct individuals, as three Gods. No doubt in our ordinary 
language, persons are understood to be separate, and mutually 
exclusive beings. Even in regard to ourselves deeper reflection 
shows us that our personalities are very far from being as separate 
as they appear to be on the surface ; and with regard to God, it 
was only with an expressed apology for the imperfection of human 
language that the Church spoke of the Divine Three, as Three 
Persons at all. But 'we have no celestial language,' and the word 
is the only one which will express what Christ's language implies 
about Himself, the Father, and the Spirit. Only while we use it, 
it must be understood to express mutual inclusion, not mutual 
exclusion. 

Wherever the Father works, He works essentially and inevitably 

1 See Godet on St. John xv. 26, 27. 

2 Athan., Epp. ad Serap., i. 19. S. John xiv. 16, 18, 23. 



vi ii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 281 

through the Son and the Spirit ; whenever the Son acts, He acts 
from the Father by the Holy Spirit; whenever the Holy Spirit 
comes, He brings with Him in His coming the Son and the 
Father. Thus when an image was necessary to interpret in part 
the Divine relationships, the Fathers sought it nowhere so much as 
in the three distinct yet inseparable elements of man's spiritual 
nature ; the triune character of which Plato had already brought 
into notice, and which is in fact an earthly image, however inade- 
quate, of the Triune God. 1 

III. Hitherto nothing has been said about that part of the 
Holy Spirit's work which is called the inspiration of Scripture. 
It has been kept to the last because of the great importance of 
putting it in context with less familiar truths. The Scriptures 
have, it is a commonplace to say, suffered greatly from being iso- 
lated. This is as true whether we are considering them as a 
source of evidence or as the sphere of inspiration. 

As a source of evidence they contain the record of historical 
facts with some of which at any rate the Creed of Christendom is 

1 Plato's human trinity is made up of reason, spirit [6v[x6s], and desire: St. 
Augustine's of memory \i. e., personal identity), reason, and will; or mind, 
knowledge, and love. Nothing has been said in the text of Patristic and 
more recent attempts to express the function of the Holy Spirit in the inner 
relations of the Trinity. Some of the Fathers speak of the Holy Spirit as 
completing the circle of the Divine Life, or as 'the return of God upon 
Himself,' 'the bond of the Father and the Son.' This eternal function 
would interpret His temporal mission to bring all creatures back into union 
with God. Not very differently St. Augustine speaks of Him as the Love 
of the Father and the Son: 'Vides Trinitatem si caritatem vides. Ecce 
tria sunt; amans et quod amatur et amor.' And this Love is itself personal 
and co-ordinate : ' commune aliquid est Patris et Filii : at ipsa commumo 
consubstantialis et coaeterna.' But in such speculation they allow themselves 
with much reserve and expression of unwillingness. 

In fact it is easy to see that an eternally living God, knowing and loving, 
must be a God Whose Being involves eternal relationships. Knowledge in- 
volves a relation of subject and object : to make love possible there must be 
a lover and a loved. It is more difficult to see how a perfect relationship 
must be threefold ; but there are true lines of thought which lead up to this, 
such, for instance, as make us see first in the family, the type of complete 
life. Love which is only a relation of two, is selfish or unsatisfied : it 
demands an object and a product of mutual love. See especially Richard 
of St. Victor, de Trim, Pars i. lib. iii. cc. 14, 15: ' Communio amoris non 
potest esse omnino minus quam in tribus personis. Nihil autem (ut dictum 
est) gloriosius. nihil magnificentius, quam quicquid habes utile et dulce in 
commune deducere; . . . hujusmodi dulcedinis delicias solus non possidet 
qui in exhibita sibi dilectione socium et condilectum non habet ; quamdiu 
condilectum non habet, praecipui gaudii communione caret.' See also Sarto- 
rius, Doctrine of Divine Love (Clark's Foreign Theol. Libr.), p. id 



282 The Religion of the Incarnation.. 

inseparably interwoven. Thus it is impossible for Christians who 
know what they are about, to underestimate the importance of 
the historical evidence for those facts at least of which the Creed 
contains a summary. But the tendency with books of historical 
evidence has been, at least till recently, to exaggerate the extent 
to which the mere evidence of remote facts can compel belief. 
What we should make of the New Testament record, what esti- 
mate we should be able to form of the Person of Jesus Christ and 
the meaning of His life and work, if it was contained simply in 
some old manuscripts, or unearthed in some way by antiquaries 
out of the Syrian sand, it is impossible to say. In order to have 
grounds for believing the facts, in order to be susceptible of their 
evidence, we require an antecedent state of conception and 
expectation. A whole set of presuppositions about God, about 
the slavery of sin, about the reasonableness of redemption, must 
be present with us. So only can the facts presented to us in the 
Gospel come to us as credible things, or as parts of an intelligible 
universe, correlated elements in a rational whole. Now the work 
of the Spirit in the Church has been to keep alive and real these 
presuppositions, this frame of mind. He convinces of sin, of 
righteousness, of judgment. He does this not merely in isolated 
individuals, however numerous, but in an organized continuous 
society. The spiritual life of the Church assures me that in desir- 
ing union with God, in feeling the burden of sin, in hungering for 
redemption, I am not doing an eccentric, abnormal thing. I am 
doing only what belongs to the best and richest movement of 
humanity. More than this, it assures me that assent to the claims 
and promises of Jesus Christ satisfies these spiritual needs in such 
a way as to produce the strongest, the most lasting, the most 
catholic sort of human character. The historical life of the Church 
thus in every age ' setting to its seal ' that God's offer in Christ is 
true, reproduces the original ' witness,' commends it to conscience 
and reason, spans the gulf of the ages, and brings down remote 
and alien incidents into close and intelligible familiarity. Lotze 
speaks of revelation as ' either contained in some divine act of 
historic occurrence or continually repeated in men's hearts.' 1 
But in fact the antithesis is not an alternative. The strength of 
the Christian Creed is that it is both. It is a revelation continu- 
ously renewed in men's hearts by an organized and systematic 
operation of the Spirit in the Church, while at the same time it 
finds its guarantee and security in certain Divine acts of historic 
occurrence. 

1 Microcosmus, B. ix. C. iv. (E. T., ii. 660.) 



viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 283 

* Once more, the belief in the Holy Scriptures as inspired re- 
quires to be held in context by the belief in the general action of 
the Holy Spirit upon the Christian society and the individual soul. 
It is, we may perhaps say, becoming more and more difficult 
to believe in the Bible without believing in the Church. The 
Apostles, indeed, — and the New Testament canon consists largely 
of the words of Apostles, — have an authority which, reasonably 
considered, is unique, and stands by itself as that of the accredited 
witnesses of Christ ; but when we find them appealing to members 
of the Church, they appeal not as the possessors of an absolute 
authority or of a Spirit in which others do not share. They are 
the ministers of a ' tradition ' to which they themselves are subject, 
a tradition ' once for all delivered : ' x they appeal to those who 
hear them as men ' who have an unction from the Holy One and 
know all things.' The tone in fact of the Apostolic writers forces 
us to regard the spirit in which the Church lives, as co-operating 
with, and in a real sense limiting, the spirit in which they them- 
selves speak and write. Thus in fact the Apostolic writings were 
written as occasion required, within the Church, and for the 
Church. They presuppose membership in it and familiarity with 
its tradition. They are secondary, not primary, instructors ; for 
edification, not for initiation. Nor, in fact, can a hard and fast 
line be drawn between what lies within and what lies without the 
canon. For example, Protestantism of an unecclesiastical sort 
has built upon the Epistle to the Hebrews as much as upon any 
book of the New Testament. This book is of unknown author- 
ship. If ' Pauline,' it is pretty certainly not St. Paul's. In large 
part it is the judgment of the Church which enables us to draw a 
line between it and St. Clement's ' scripture.' The line indeed 
our own judgment approves. The Epistle to the Hebrews and 
St. Clement's letter are closely linked together, but the latter 
depends on the former : it is secondary, and the other is primary. 
Yet how narrow is the historical interval between them ! How 
impossible to tear the one from the other ! How seemingly irra- 
tional to attribute absolute authority to the anonymous Epistle to 
the Hebrews, which represents Apostolic teaching at second hand, 2 
and then to interpret it in a sense hostile to the Epistle of 
Clement, which represents exactly the same stream of Apostolic 
teaching only one short stage lower down ! For Clement inter- 
prets the high priesthood of Christ in a sense which, instead of 
excluding, makes it the basis of, the ministerial hierarchy of the 

1 See especially Gal. i. 8, 9. 2 Heb. \\. 3, 



284 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

Church. Or to put the matter more broadly, how irrational it is, 
considering the intimate links by which the New Testament canon 
is bound up with the historic Church, not to accept the mind 
of the Church, especially when we have its consent down 
independent lines of tradition, as interpreting the mind of the 
Apostolic writers. Most rational surely is the attitude of the early 
Church towards Scripture. The Scripture was regarded as the 
highest utterance of the Spirit, the unique and constant test of 
the Church's life and teaching. But the Spirit in the Church 
interpreted the meaning of Scripture. Thus the Church taught 
and the Scripture tested and verified or corrected her teaching : 
and this because all was of one piece, the life of the Church 
including the Scriptures, the inspired writers themselves appealing 
to the Spirit in the Churches. 1 

And now, what is to be said about this, at present, much con- 
troverted subject of the inspiration of Holy Scripture? What 
does the doctrine imply, and what attitude does belief in it involve 
towards the modern critical treatment of the inspired literature ? 

1. Let us bear carefully in mind the place which the doctrine 
holds in the building up of a Christian faith. It is in fact an 
important part of the superstructure, but it is not among the bases 
of the Christian belief. The Christian creed asserts the reality of 
certain historical facts. To these facts, in the Church's name, we 
claim assent : but we do so on grounds which, so far, are quite 
independent of the inspiration of the evangelic records. All that 
we claim to show at this stage is that they are historical : not 
historical so as to be absolutely without error, but historical in the 
general sense, so as to be trustworthy. All that is necessary for 
faith in Christ is to be found in the moral dispositions which pre- 
dispose to belief, and make intelligible and credible the thing to 
be believed : coupled with such acceptance of the generally his- 
torical character of the Gospels, and of the trustworthiness of the 
other Apostolic documents, as justifies belief that our Lord was 
actually born of the Virgin Mary, manifested as the Son of God 
' with power according to a spirit of holiness,' crucified, raised 
again the third day from the dead, exalted to the right hand of 
the Father, the Founder of the Church and the Source to it of the 
informing Spirit. 

In all this no claim is made for any special belief as to the 
method of the Spirit's work in the Scripture or in the Church. 

1 See further on the fatal results of separating the Spirit's work in Scrip- 
ture from His work in the Church, Coleridge, Remains, iii. 93, iv. 118; or 
quoted by Hare, Mission of the Comforter, Note H, ii. 468, 474. 



viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration, 285 

Logically such belief follows, does not precede, belief in Christ. 
Indeed, in the past, Christian apologists have made a great mistake 
in allowing opponents to advance as objections against the his- 
torical character of the Gospel narrative what are really objections 
not against its historical character, — not such as could tell against 
the substantially historical character of secular documents, — but 
against a certain view of the meaning of inspiration. Let it be 
laid down, then, that Christianity brings with it indeed a doctrine 
of the inspiration of Holy Scriptures, but is not based upon it. 1 

2. But such a doctrine it does bring with it. Our Lord and 
His Apostles are clearly found to believe and to teach that the 
Scriptures of the Old Testament were given by inspiration of God ; 
and the Christian Church from the earliest days postulated the 
same belief about the Scriptures of the New Testament. To dis- 
believe that ' the Scriptures were spoken by the Holy Ghost,' was 
equivalent to being ' an unbeliever.' 2 

Thus when once a man finds himself a believer in Christ, he 
will find himself in a position where alike the authority of his Mas- 
ter and the ' communis sensus ' of the society he belongs to give 
into his hand certain documents and declare them inspired. 

3. What in its general idea does this mean? 

St. Athanasius expresses the function of the Jews in the world in 
a luminous phrase, when he describes them as having been the 
' sacred school for all the world of the knowledge of God and of 
the spiritual life.' 3 Every race has its special vocation, and we 
recognize in the great writers of each race the interpreters of that 
vocation. They are specially gifted individuals, but not merely 
individuals. The race speaks in them. Rome is interpreted by 
Virgil, and Greece by ^Eschylus or Plato. Now, every believer 
in God must see in these special missions of races a Divine inspi- 
ration. If we can once get down to the bottom of human life, — 
below its pride, its wilfulness, its pretentiousness, down to its 
essence, — we get to God and to a movement of His Spirit. 4 
Thus every race has its inspiration and its prophets. 

But the inspiration of the Jews was supernatural. What does 
this mean? That the Jews were selected, — not to be the school 
for humanity in any of the arts and sciences which involve the 
thought of God only indirectly, and can therefore be carried on 

1 This distinction was drawn by Bishop Clifford, Fortnightly Review, 
January, 1887, p. 145. 

2 Cf. the quotation in Eusebius, H. E., v. 28. 

3 Athan., de Incarn., 12. Cf. Ewald's preface to his History of Israel. 

4 See Gratry, Henri Perreyve, pp 162, 163. 



286 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

without a fundamental restoration of man into that relation to God 
which sin had clouded or broken, — but to be the school of that 
fundamental restoration itself. Therefore, in the case of the Jews 
the inspiration is both in itself more direct and more intense, and 
also involves a direct consciousness on the part of its subjects. In 
the race, indeed, the consciousness might be dim ; but the con- 
sciousness, as the prophets all assure us, did belong to the race, 
I md not merely to its individual interpreters. They speak as 
•recalling the people to something which they know, or ought to 
know, not as preachers of a new religion. They were ' the con- 
science of the state.' x But special men — prophets, psalmists, 
moralists, historians — were thus the inspired interpreters of the 
Divine message to and in the race ; and their inspiration lies in 
this : that they were the subjects of a movement of the Holy 
Ghost, so shaping, controlling, quickening their minds and thoughts 
and aspirations, as to make them the instruments through which 
was imparted ' the knowledge of God and of the spiritual life.' 

Various are the degrees of this inspiration ; the inspiration of 
the prophet is direct, continuous, absorbing. The inspiration 
of the writer of Ecclesiastes, on the other hand, is such as to lead 
him to ponder on all the phases of a worldly experience, passing 
through many a false conclusion and cynical denial, till at the last 
his thought is led to unite itself to the great stream of Divine 
movement by finding the only possible solution of the problems of 
life in the recognition of God and in obedience to Him. 

Various also are the sorts of literature inspired ; for the super- 
natural fertilizes and does not annihilate the natural. The Church 
repudiated the Montanist conception of inspiration, according to 
which the inspired man speaks in ecstasy, as the passive, uncon- 
scious instrument of the Spirit ; and the metaphors which would 
describe the Holy Spirit as acting upon a man ' like a flute-player 
breathing into his flute,' or ' a plectrum striking a lyre,' have 
always a suspicion of heresy attaching to their use. 2 As the 
humanity of Christ is none the less a true humanity for being con- 
ditioned by absolute oneness with God, so the human activity is 
none the less free, conscious, rational, because the Spirit inspires 
it. The poet is a poet, the philosopher a philosopher, the his- 
torian an historian, each with his own idiosyncrasies, ways, and 
methods, to be interpreted each by the laws of his own literature. 

1 Delitzsch, O. T. History of Redemption, p. 106. Cf . Professor Robertson 
Smith, Propht-ts of Israel, p. 108. 

2 See Eoiphan., Ha;r., xlviii. 4 ; Westcott, In trod, to the Study of the 
Gospels, App. B, sect. ii. 4, sect, iv. 4 ; Mason, Faith of the Gospel, p. 255. 



vni. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 287 

And just as truly as physiology, in telling us more and more about 
the human body is telling us about the body which the Son of God 
assumed, so with the growth of our knowledge about the kinds and 
sequences of human literature shall we know more and more about 
the literature of the Jews which the Holy Spirit inspired. 

What, then, is meant by the inspiration of Holy Scripture? If 
we begin our inquiry with the account of creation with which the 
Jible opens, we may take note of its affinities in general substance 
with the Babylonian and Phoenician cosmogonies ; but we are much 
more struck with its differences, and it is in these we shall look for 
its inspiration. We observe that it has for its motive and impulse 
not the satisfaction of a fantastic curiosity or the later interest of 
scientific discovery, but to reveal certain fundamental religious 
principles ; that everything as we see it was made by God ; that it 
has no being in itself but at God's will. On the other hand, that 
everything is in its essence good, as the product of the good God ; 
that man, besides sharing the physical nature of all creation, has a 
special relation to God, as made in God's image, to be God's vice- 
gerent ; that sin, and all that sin brings with it of misery and death, 
came not of man's nature, but of his disobedience to God and 
rejection of the limitations under which He put him ; that in spite 
of all that sin brought about, God has not left man to himself, that 
there is a hope and a promise. These are the fundamental prin- 
ciples of true religion and progressive morality, and in these lies 
the supernatural inspiration of the Bible account of creation. 1 

As we pass on down the record of Genesis, we do not find our- 
selves in any doubt as to the primary and certain meaning of its 
inspiration. The first traditions of the race are all given there from 
a special point of view. In that point of view lies the inspiration. 
It is that everything is presented to us as illustrating God's deal- 
ings with man, — God's judgment on sin ; His call of a single man 
to work out a universal mission ; His gradual delimitation of a 
chosen race ; His care for the race ; His overruling of evil to work 
out His purpose. The narrative of Genesis has all the fullest 
, wealth of human interest, but it is in the unveiling of the hand of 
Sod that its special characteristic lies. As we go on into the his- 
tory we find the recorders acting like the recorders of other 
nations, — collecting, sorting, adapting, combining their materials ; 
but in this inspired : that the animating motive of their work is 
not to bring out the national glory or to flatter the national vanity, 
nor, like the motive of a modern historian, — the mere interest in 

1 See Professor Driver's admirable article on ' the cosmogony of Genesis-' 
Expositor, January, 1886. 



288 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

fact, — but to keep before the chosen people the record of how- 
God has dealt with them. This, as we perceive, gives them a spe- 
cial sense of the value of fact. 1 They record what God has done, 
how God did in such and such ways take action on behalf of His 
peculiar people ; delivering them, punishing them, teaching them, 
keeping them, disciplining them for higher ends. And none who 
have eyes to see God's spiritual purposes can doubt that those his- 
torians read aright the chronicles of the kings of Israel. The 
spiritual significance which they see is the true significance. 
God's special purpose was on Israel. 

It is not necessary to emphasize in what consists the special 
inspiration of psalmists or of prophets. The psalmists take some 
of the highest places among the poets of all nations, but the poetic 
faculty is directed to one great end, — to reveal the soul in its rela- 
tion to God, in its exultations and in its self-abasements. ' Where 
. . . did they come from, those piercing, lightning-like gleams of 
strange spiritual truth, those magnificent outlooks upon the king- 
dom of God, those raptures at His presence and His glory, those 
wonderful disclosures of self-knowledge, those pure outpourings 
of the love of God ? Surely here is something more than the mere 
working of the mind of man. Surely . . . they repeat the whis- 
pers of the Spirit of God, they reflect the very light of the Eternal 
Wisdom.' 2 

In the case of prophets once more we get the most obvious 
and typical instances of inspiration. 3 The prophets make a direct 
claim to be the instruments of the Divine Spirit. Not that the 
Divine Spirit supersedes their human faculties, but He intensifies 
them. They see deeper under the surface of life what God is 
doing, and therefore further into the future what He will do. No 

1 Professor Cheyne. speaking of such narratives of Scriptures as the 
record of Elijah, protests against the supposition that they are 'true to fact.' 
1 True to fact ! Who goes to the artist for hard dry facts ? Why even the 
historians of antiquity thought it no part of their duty to give the mere prose 
of life. How much less can the unconscious artists of the imaginative East 
have described their heroes with relentless photographic accuracy ! ' (The 
Hallowing of Criticism, p. 5.) But it seems to me that such a passage, by 
treating the recorders of the Old Testament as ' artists,' ignores their obvious 
intention to lay stress on what God has actually done, the deliverances He 
has actually wrought. They, at least, like the Greek historical ' artist ' of 
the defeat of Persia, would have laid great stress on the facts having 
happened. 

2 Church, Discipline of the Christian Character, p. 57. This work seems 
to me the best existing answer to the question, in what does the inspiration 
of the Old Testament consist. 

3 Cf. pp. I34-I39- 



viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 289 

doubt their predictive knowledge is general, it is of the issue to 
which things tend. It is not at least usually a knowledge ' of 
times and of seasons which the Father hath put in His own power.' 
Thus at times they foreshorten the distance, and place the great 
deliverance and the ' day of Jehovah ' in the too immediate fore- 
ground. 1 The prophetic inspiration is thus consistent with erro- 
neous anticipations as to the circumstances and the opportunity of 
God's self-revelation, just as the Apostolic inspiration admitted of 
St. Paul expecting the second coming of Christ within his own life- 
time. But the prophets claim to be directly and really inspired to 
teach and interpret what God is doing and commanding in their 
own age, and to forecast what in judgment and redemptive mercy 
God means to do and must do in the Divine event. The figure 
of the king Messiah dawns upon their horizon with increasing 
definiteness of outline and characteristic, and we, with the expe- 
rience of history between us and them, are sure that the corre- 
spondence of prophecy and fulfilment can be due to no other 
cause than that they spoke in fact the ' word of the Lord.' 

Thus there is built up for us in the literature of a nation, marked 
by an unparalleled unity of purpose and character, a spiritual 
fabric, which in its result we cannot but recognize as the action 
of the Divine Spirit. A knowledge of God and of the spiritual life 
gradually appears, not as the product of human ingenuity, but as 
the result of Divine communication : and the outcome of this 
communication is to produce an organic whole which postulates 
a climax not yet reached, a redemption not yet given, a hope not 
yet satisfied. In this general sense at least no Christian ought to 
feel a difficulty in believing, and believing with joy, in the inspira- 
tion of the Old Testament : nor can he feel that he is left without 
a standard by which to judge what it means. Christ, the goal of 
Old Testament development, stands forth as the test and measure 
of its inspiration. 

The New Testament consists of writings of Apostles or of men 
of sub-apostolic rank, like St. Luke and probably the author of the 
Epistle to the Hebrews. There is not, except perhaps in the case 
of the Apocalypse, any sign of an inspiration to write, other than 
the inspiration which gave power to teach. What then is, whether 
for writing or for teaching, the inspiration of an Apostle ? 

If Jesus Christ both was, and knew Himself to be, the Revealer 

1 See, for instance, Micah v. 2-6. For an anticipation not historically 
fulfilled in details, see Isaiah x. 28-32 ; cf. Driver's Isaiah, p. 73. See also 
the prophecies of the destruction of Tyre by Babylon, Jer. xxvii. 3-6: Ezek. 
xxvi. 4-17 ; and contrast Ezek. xxix. 17-21. 

19 



200 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

of the Father, it almost stands to reason that He must have secured 
that His revelation should be, without material alloy, communica- 
ted to the Church which was to enshrine and perpetuate it. Thus, 
in fact, we find that He spent His chief pains on the training of 
His Apostolic witnesses. And all the training which He gave 
them while He was present among them was only to prepare them 
to receive the Holy Ghost Who, after He was gone; was to be 
poured out upon them to qualify them to bear His witness among 
men. 

' Ye shall receive power, when the Holy Ghost is come upon 
you, and ye shall be My witnesses.' ' These things have I spoken 
unto you while yet abiding with you. And the Comforter, even 
the Holy Ghost, Whom the Father will send in My name, He 
shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that 
I said unto you.' ' I have yet many things to say unto you, but 
ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when He, the Spirit of truth, 
is come, He will guide you into all the truth.' 1 

Thus the Church sees in the Apostles men specially and delib- 
erately qualified to interpret Christ to the world'. It understands 
by their inspiration an endowment which enables men of all ages 
to take their teaching as representing, and not misrepresenting, 
His teaching and Himself. In St. John's Gospel, for example, 
we have an account of our Lord which has obviously passed 
through the medium of a most remarkable personality. We have 
the outcome of the meditation, as well as the recollection, of the 
Apostle. But, as the evidence assures us that the Gospel is really 
St. John's, so the Church unhesitatingly accepts St. John's strong 
and repeated asseveration that he is interpreting and not distorting 
the record, the personality, the claims of Jesus Christ. ' He bears 
record, and his record is true.' 2 

This assurance is indeed not without verification : it is verified 
by the unity of testimony which, under all differences of character 
and circumstance, we find among the Apostolic witnesses. The 
accepted doctrine of the Church when St. Paul wrote his 
' undoubted Epistles ' — the points of agreement amidst all differ- 
ences between him and the judaizers — gives us substantially the 
same conception of the Person of the Incarnate Son of God as 
we find in St. John. 3 The same conception of what He was, is 
required to interpret the record of what He did and said in the 

1 Acts i. 8. St. John xiv. 25, 26; xvi. 12, 13. 

2 St. John xix. 35 ; xxi. 24. 1 St. John i. 1-3. 

3 See Professor Sanday's What the First Christians thought about Christ. 
(Oxford House Papers : Rivington.) 



vin. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 291 

Synoptic Gospels. Further, the witness of the Apostles, though it 
receives its final guarantee through the belief in their inspiration, 
has its natural basis in the prolonged training by which — ' cora- 
panying with them all the time that He went in and out among 
them, beginning from the baptism of John, until the day that He 
was received up,' — they were prepared to be His witnesses. 
Thus if an act of faith is asked of us in the Apostolic inspiration, 
it is a reasonable act of faith. 

If we pass from the writings properly Apostolic to those like St. 
Luke's records, which represent Apostolic teaching at second hand, 
we do not find that the inspiration of their writers was of such sort 
as enabled them to dispense with the ordinary means or guarantees 
of accuracy. The simple claim of St. Luke's preface to have had 
the best means of information and to have taken the greatest care 
in the use of them, is on this score most instructive. We should 
suppose that their inspiration was part of the whole spiritual 
endowment of their life which made them the trusted friends of 
the Apostles, and qualified them to be the chosen instruments to 
record their teaching, in the midst of a Church whose quick and 
eager memory of ' the tradition ' would have acted as a check to 
prevent any material error creeping into the record. 

4. It will be remembered that when inspiration is spoken of 
by St. Paul, he mentions it as a positive endowment which quali- 
fies the writings of those who were its subjects, to be permanent 
sources of spiritual instruction. ' Every Scripture inspired of God 
is also profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for in- 
struction which is in righteousness.' * Following out this idea of 
Holy Scripture, then, we are led to think of the belief in inspiration 
as having this primary practical result : that we submit ourselves to 
the teaching of every book which is given to us as inspired. We 
are to put ourselves to school with each in turn of the inspired 
writers ; with St. James, for example, in the New Testament, as 
well as with St. John and St. Paul ; with St. Luke as well as with 
St. Matthew ; with the Pastoral Epistles as well as with the Epistle 
to the Galatians. 2 At starting, each of us, according to his predis- 
position, is conscious of liking some books of Scripture better than 
others. This, however, should lead us to recognize that in some 
way we specially need the teaching which is less attractive to us. 
We should set ourselves to study what we like less, till that too has 
had its proper effect in moulding our conscience and character. 

1 2 Tim. iii. 16. 

2 Mr. Horton's book on Inspiration and the Bible is almost naively lack- 
ing in this quality of impartial regard to inspired books. 



292 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

It is hardly possible to estimate how much division would have 
been avoided in the Church if those, for example, who were most 
ecclesiastically disposed had been at pains to assimilate the teach- 
ing of the Epistle to the Romans, and those who most valued ' the 
freedom of the Gospel,' had recognized a special obligation to 
deepen their hold on the Epistles to the Corinthians and the 
Pastoral Epistles and the Epistle of St. James. 

To believe in the inspiration of Holy Scripture is to put our- 
selves to school with every part of the Old Testament, as of the 
New. True, the Old Testament is imperfect, but for that very 
reason has a special value. ' The real use of the earlier record is 
not to add something to the things revealed in Christ, but to give 
us that clear and all-sided insight into the meaning and practical 
worth of the perfect scheme of Divine grace which can only be 
attained by tracing its growth.' x We see in the Old Testament the 
elements, each in separation, which went to make up the perfect 
whole, and which must still lie at the basis of all rightly formed life 
of individuals and societies. 

Thus to believe, for instance, in the inspiration of the Old Tes- 
tament forces us to recognize a real element of the Divine educa- 
tion in the imprecatory Psalms. They are not the utterances of 
selfish spite : 2 they are the claim which righteous Israel makes 
upon God that He should vindicate Himself, and let their eyes see 
how ' righteousness turns again unto judgment.' The claim is 
made in a form which b^ongs to an early stage of spiritual educa- 
tion ; to a time when this life was regarded as the scene in which 
God must finally vindicate Himself, and when the large powers and 
possibilities of the Divine compassion were very imperfectly recog- 
nized. But behind these limitations, which characterize the greater 
part of the Old Testament, the claim of these Psalms still remains 
a necessary part of the claim of the Christian soul. We must not 
only recognize the reality of Divine judgments in time and eter- 
nity, bodily and spiritual ; we must not only acquiesce in them 
because they are God's ; we must go on to claim of God the 
manifestation of His just judgment, so that holiness and joy, sin 
and failure, shall be seen to coincide. 

To recognize then the inspiration of the Bible is to put ourselves 
to school in every part of it, and everywhere to bear in mind the 
admonition of the De Imitatione ' that every Scripture must be 

1 Professor Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, p. 6. 

2 Cf. Professor Robertson Smith, The Old Testament in the Jewish Church, 
Lect. vii. p. 207 : ' Another point in which criticism removes a serious diffi- 
culty is the interpretation of the imprecatory psalms/ 



vin. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 293 

read in the same spirit in which it was written.' So far it will not 
be a point in dispute among Christians what inspiration means, or 
what its purpose is. ' The Councils of Trent and the Vatican,' 
writes Cardinal Newman, ' tell us distinctly the object and the 
promise of Scriptural inspiration. They specify " faith and moral 
conduct " as the drift of that teaching which has the guarantee of 
inspiration.' x Nor can it be denied that the more Holy Scripture 
is read from this point of view, the more confidently it is treated 
as the inspired guide of faith and conduct, no less in the types 
of character which it sets before us than in its direct instruction, 
the more the experience and appreciation of its inspiration grows 
upon us, so that to deny or to doubt it comes to mean to deny 
or to doubt a matter plain to the senses. Indeed what has been 
said under this head will probably appear to those practised in the 
spiritual use of Holy Scripture as an under-statement, perhaps 
not easy to justify, of the sense in which the Scripture is the word 
of God and the spiritual food of the soul. 2 

5. But here certain important questions arise, (a) The revel- 
ation of God was made in a historical process. Its record is in 
large part the record of a national life : it is historical. Now the 
inspiration of the recorder lies, as we have seen, primarily in this, 
that he sees the hand of God in the history and interprets His 
purpose. Further, we must add, his sense of the working of God 
in history increases his realization of the importance of historical 
fact. Thus there is a profound air of historical truthfulness per- 
vading the Old Testament record from Abraham downward. The 
weaknesses, the sins, of Israel's heroes are not spared. Their sin 
and its punishment are always before us. There is no flattering of 
national pride, no giving the reins to boastfulness. In all this the 
Old Testament appears to be in marked contrast, as to contempo- 
rary Assyrian monuments, so also to a good deal of much later 
ecclesiastical history. But does the inspiration of the recorder 
guarantee the exact historical truth of what he records? And in 
matter of fact can the record, with due regard to legitimate histo- 
rical criticism, be pronounced true ? Now, to the latter of these 
two questions (and they are quite distinct questions) we may reply 
that there is nothing to prevent our believing, as our faith certainly 

1 See Nineteenth Century, February, 1884, p. 189. 

2 ' When from time to time,' says St. Bernard to his monks, ' anything that 
was hidden or obscure in the Scriptures has come out into the light to any 
one of you, at once the voice of exultation and thankfulness for the nourish- 
ment of spiritual food that has been received must rise as from a banquet 
to delight the ears of God.' 



294 The Religion of the Incarnation, 

strongly disposes us to believe, that the record from Abraham 
downward is in substance in the strict sense historical. Of course 
the battle of historical truth cannot be fought on the field of the 
Old Testament as it can on that of the New, because it is so 
vast and indecisive, and because (however certainly ancient is 
such a narrative as that contained in Genesis xiv.) very little 
of the early record can be securely traced to a period near the 
events. Thus the Church cannot insist upon the historical charac- 
ter of the earliest records of the ancient Church in detail, as she 
can on the historical character of the Gospels or the Acts of the 
Apostles. On the other hand, as it seems the more probable 
opinion that the Hebrews must have been acquainted with the art 
of writing in some form long before the Exodus, there is no reason 
to doubt the existence of some written records among them from 
very early days. 1 Internal evidence again certainly commends to 
our acceptance the history of the patriarchs, of the Egyptian bond- 
age, of the great redemption, of the wanderings, as well as of the 
later period as to which there would be less dispute. In a word, 
we are, we believe, not wrong in anticipating that the Church will 
continue to believe and to teach that the Old Testament from Abra- 
ham downwards is really historical, and that there will be nothing 
to make such belief and teaching unreasonable or wilful. But within 
the limits of what is substantially historical, there is still room for 
an admixture of what, though marked by spiritual purpose, is yet 
not strictly historical, — for instance, for a feature which charac- 
terizes all early history, the attribution to first founders of what is 
really the remoter result of their institutions. Now historical criti- 
cism 2 assures us that this process has been largely at work in the 
Pentateuch. By an analysis, for instance, the force of which is 
very great, it distinguishes distinct stages in the growth of the law of 
worship : at least an early stage such as is represented in ' the Book 
of the Covenant,' 3 a second stage in the Book of Deuteronomy, a 
last stage in ' the Priestly Code.' What we may suppose to have 

1 See the Annual Address (1889) delivered at the Victoria Institute by 
Professor Sayce on the cuneiform tablets of Tel el-amarna, pp. 4, 14 f. : ' We 
learn that in the fifteenth century before our era — a century before the 
Exodus — active literary intercourse was going on throughout the civilized 
world of Western Asia, between Babylonia and Egypt and the smaller States 
of Palestine. . . . This intercourse was carried on by means of the Babylonian 
language and the complicated Babylonian script. How educated the old 
world was, we are but just beginning to learn. But we have already learnt 
enough to discover how important a bearing it has on the criticism of the 
Old Testament.' 

' 2 See Driver, Crit Notes on Sunday-school Lessons (Scribner : New York). 

3 Ex. xx. xxii.-xxiii. xxxiii. 



vni. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 295 

happened is that Moses himself established a certain germ of cere- 
monial enactment in connection with the ark and its sacred tent, 
and with the ' ten words ; ' and that this developed always as 6 the 
law of Moses,' the whole result being constantly attributed, probably 
unconsciously and certainly not from any intention to deceive, to 
the original founder. This view would certainly imply that the 
recorders of Israel's history were subject to the ordinary laws in the 
estimate of evidence, that their inspiration did not consist in a 
miraculous communication to them of facts as they originally hap- 
pened ; but if we believe that the law, as it grew, really did repre- 
sent the Divine intention for the Jews, gradually worked out upon the 
jf a Mosaic institution, there is nothing materially untruthful, 
though there is something uncritical, in attributing the whole legisla- 
tion to Moses acting under the Divine command. It would be only 
of a piece with the attribution of the collection of Psalms to David 
and of Proverbs to Solomon. Nor does the supposition that the law 
was of gradual growth interfere in any way with the symbolical and 
typical value of its various ordinances. 

Once again, the same school of criticism would assure us that the 
Books of Chronicles represent a later and less historical version of 
Israel's history than that given in Samuel and Kings : * they repre- 
sent, according to this view, the version of that history which had 
become current in the priestly schools. What we are asked to 
admit is not conscious perversion, but unconscious idealizing of 
history, the reading back into past records of a ritual development 
which was really later. Now inspiration excludes conscious decep- 
tion or pious fraud, but it appears to be quite consistent with this 
sort of idealizing, — always supposing that the result read back into 
the earlier history does represent the real purpose of God, and only 
anticipates its realization. 

Here then is one great question. Inspiration certainly means the 
illumination of the judgment of the recorder. ' By the contact of 
the Holy Spirit,' says Origen, ' they became clearer in their mental 
perceptions, and their souls were filled with a brighter light.' 2 But 
have we any reason to believe that it means, over and above this, 
the miraculous communication of facts not otherwise to be known. 
a miraculous communication such as would make the recorder 
independent of the ordinary processes of historical tradition? Cer- 
tainly neither St. Luke's preface to his Gospel, nor the evidence of 
any inspired record, justifies us in this assumption. Nor would it 

1 The Books of Kings seem to be compiled from the point of view of the 
Deuteronomist. 

2 Origen, c. Cels., vii 4. 



296 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

appear that spiritual illumination, even in the highest degree, has 
any tendency to lift men out of the natural conditions of knowledge 
which belong to their time. Certainly in the similar case of exe- 
gesis, it would appear that St. Paul is left to the method of his time, 
though he uses it with inspired insight into the function and mean- 
ing of law and of prophecy as a whole. Thus, without pronouncing 
an opinion, where we have no right to do so, on the critical ques- 
tions at present under discussion, we may maintain with consider- 
able assurance that there is nothing in the doctrine of inspiration to 
prevent our recognizing a considerable idealizing element in the Old 
Testament history. The reason is of course obvious enough why 
what can be admitted in the Old Testament, could not, without 
results disastrous to the Christian Creed, be admitted in the New. 
It is because the Old Testament is the record of how God produced 
a need, or anticipation, or ideal, while the New Testament records 
how in fact He satisfied it. The absolute coincidence of idea and 
fact is vital in the realization, not in the preparation for it. It is 
equally obvious, too, that where fact is of supreme importance, as in 
the New Testament, the evidence has none of the ambiguity or re- 
moteness which belongs to much of the record of the preparation. 
{b) But once again ; we find all sorts of literature in the inspired 
volume : men can be inspired to think and to write for God under 
all the forms of natural genius. Now one form of genius is the 
dramatic : its essence is to make characters, real or imaginary, the 
vehicles for an ideal presentation. It presents embodied ideas. 
Now the Song of Solomon is of the nature of a drama. The book 
of Job, although it works on an historical basis, is, it can hardly be 
denied, mainly dramatic. The Book of Wisdom, which with us is 
among the books of the Bible, though in the second rank, outside 
the canon, and which is inside the canon of the Roman Church, 
professes to be written by Solomon, 1 but is certainly written not by 
him, but in his person by another author. We may then conceive 
the same to be true of Ecclesiastes and of Deuteronomy ; i. <?., we 
may suppose Deuteronomy to be a republication of the law * in 
the spirit and power ' of Moses put dramatically into his mouth. 
Criticism goes further, and asks us to regard Jonah and Daniel, 



1 E. g., chs. vii., ix. The Roman Church admits that it is, to use Newman's 
phrase, 'a prosopopoeia;' 'our Bibles say, "it is written in the person of 
Solomon," and "it is uncertain who was the writer," ' 1. c, p. 197. It is 
important to bear in mind that the Western Church in general has, since 
St. Agustine's day, admitted into the canon a book the literary method of 
which is thus confessedly dramatic. Newman makes this the ground for 
saying that the same may be true of Ecclesiastes. 



viii. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 297 

among the prophetic books, as dramatic compositions worked up 
on a basis of history. The discussion of these books has often been 
approached from a point of view from which the miraculous is 
necessarily unhistorical. With such a point of view we are not con- 
cerned. The possibility and reality of miracles has to be vindicated 
first of all in the field of the New Testament ; and one who admits 
them there, cannot reasonably exclude their possibility in the earlier 
history. The question must be treated simply on literary and evi- 
dential grounds. 1 But we would contend that if criticism should 
show these books to be probably dramatic, that would be no hin- 
drance to their performing ' an important canonical function,' or to 
their being inspired. Dramatic composition has played an immense 
part in training the human mind. It is as far removed as possible 
from a violation of truth, though in an uncritical age its results may 
very soon pass for history. It admits of being inspired as much as 
poetry or history, and indeed there are few who could feel a diffi- 
culty in recognizing as inspired the teaching of the books of Jonah 
and Daniel. 2 It is maintained then that the Church leaves open 
to literary criticism the question whether several of the writings 
of the Old Testament are or are not dramatic. Certainly the fact 
that they have not commonly been taken to be so in the past will 
be no evidence to the contrary, unless it can be denied that a liter- 
ary criticism is being developed, which is as really new an intel- 
lectual product as the scientific development, and as such, certain 
to reverse a good many of the literary judgments of previous ages. 
We are being asked to make considerable changes in our literary 
conception of the Scriptures, but not greater changes than were 
involved in the acceptance of the heliocentric astronomy. 

(c) Once again : an enlarged study of comparative history has 
led to our perceiving that the various sorts of mental or literary 
activity develop in their different lines out of an earlier condition 
in which they lie fused and undifferentiated. This we can vaguely 
call the mythical stage of mental evolution. A myth is not a false- 
hood ; it is a product of mental activity, as instructive and rich as 
any later product, but its characteristic is that it is not yet distin- 
guished into history, and poetry, and philosophy. It is all of these 

1 On the evidence of O. T. miracles I may refer to Mr. Samuel Cox's 
Essay: Miracles, an Argument and a Challenge. (Kegan Paul, 1884.) 

2 Of course the distinction must be maintained in the case of the book of 
Daniel between a ' pious fraud,' which cannot be inspired, and an idealizing 
personification, which, as a normal type of literature, can. Further study will 
probably solve the special difficulty which on the critical hypothesis attaches 
to the book of Daniel from this point of view ; see Stanton, Jewish and 
Christian Messiah, p. 109, note I. 



29 3 The Religion of the Incarnation, 

in the germ, as dream and imagination, and thought and experience, 
are fused in the mental furniture of a child's mind. ' These myths, 
or current stories,' says Grote, writing of Greek history, ' the spon- 
taneous and earliest growth of the Greek mind, constituted at the 
same time the entire intellectual stock of the age to which they be- 
longed. They are the common root of all those different rami- 
fications into which the mental activity of the Greeks subsequently 
diverged ; containing, as it were, the preface and germ of the 
positive history and philosophy, the dogmatic theology and the pro- 
fessed romance, which we shall hereafter trace, each in its separate 
development/ Now has the Jewish history such earlier stage? 
Does it pass back out of history into myth ? In particular, are 
not its earlier narratives, before the call of Abraham, of the nature 
of myth, in which we cannot distinguish the historical germ, though 
we do not at all deny that it exists ? The inspiration of these nar- 
ratives is as conspicuous as that of any part of scripture ; but is 
there anything to prevent our regarding these great inspirations 
about the origin of all things, — the nature of sin, the judgment of 
God on sin, and the alienation among men which follows their 
alienation from God, — as conveyed to us in that form of myth or 
allegorical picture, which is the earliest mode in which the mind of 
man apprehended truth? 

6. The present writer, believing that the modern development 
of historical criticism is reaching results as sure, where it is fairly 
used, as scientific inquiry, and feeling, therefore, that the warning 
which the name of Galileo must ever bring before the memory of 
Churchmen, is not unneeded now, believes also that the Church is 
in no way restrained from admitting the modifications just hinted 
at, in what has latterly been the current idea of inspiration. 

The Church is not restrained, in the first place, by having com- 
mitted herself to any dogmatic definitions of the meaning of inspir- 
ation. 1 It is remarkable indeed that Origen's almost reckless 
mysticism, and his accompanying repudiation of the historical charac- 
ter of large parts of the narrative of the Old Testament, and of some 
parts of the New, 2 though it did not gain acceptance, and indeed 

1 This is certainly true of the Church as a whole. For the most that can 
be said in the same sense of the Roman Church, see Newman in the article 
above cited. 

2 De Principiis, iv. 15, 16, 17. His point is that incidents which could not 
have occurred in fact, or at least did not occur, are inserted in the narrative of 
the Old and New Testaments, that their very historical impossibility or im- 
probability may drive us to the consideration of their spiritual significance. 
' The attentive reader may notice . . . innumerable other passages, like 
these, so that he will be convinced that in tli2 histories that are literally 



vin. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 299 

had no right to it (for it had no sound basis), on the other hand 
never roused the Church to contrary definitions. Nor is it only 
Origen who disputed the historical character of parts of the narra- 
tive of Holy Scripture. Clement before him in Alexandria, and 
the mediaeval Anselm in the West, treat the seven days' creation 
as allegory and not history. Athanasius speaks of paradise as a 
' figure.' A mediaeval Greek writer, who had more of Irenaeus 
than remains to us, declared that ' he did not know how those who 
kept to the letter and took the account of the temptation histori 
cally rather than allegorically, could meet the arguments of Irenaeus 
against them.' Further than this, it cannot be denied that the mys- 
tical method, as a whole, tended to the depreciation of the his- 
torical sense, in comparison with the spiritual teaching which it 
conveyed. 1 . In a different line, Chrysostom, of the literal school of 
interpreters, explains quite in the tone of a modern apologist, how 
the discrepancies in detail between the different Gospels assure us 
of the independence of the witnesses, and do not touch the facts 
of importance in which all agree. 

The Church is not tied then by any existing definitions. We 
cannot make any exact claim upon any one's belief in regard to 
inspiration, simply because we have no authoritative definition to 
bring to bear upon him. Those of us who believe most in the 
inspiration of the Church will see a Divine Providence in this 
absence of dogma, because we shall perceive that only now is the 
state of knowledge such as admits of the question being legitimately 
raised. 

Nor does it seem that the use which our Lord made of the Old 
Testament is an argument against the proposed concessions. Our 
Lord, in His use of the Old Testament, does indeed indorse with 
the utmost emphasis the Jewish view of their own history. He 
does thus imply, on the one hand, the real inspiration of their 
canon in its completeness, and, on the other hand, that He Him- 
self was the goal of that inspired leading and the standard of that 
inspiration. ' Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day ; ' * I 
am not come to destroy, but to fufil.' This, and it is the important 
matter for all that concerns our spiritual education, is not in dis- 
pute. What is questioned is that our Lord's words foreclose cer- 
tain critical positions as to the character of Old Testament litera- 
ture. For example, does His use of Jonah's resurrection, as a type 
of His own, depend in any real degree upon whether it is historical 

recorded, circumstances are inserted that did not occur.' 
Platonists, pp. 137-138. 

1 Cf. Jerome, ad Nepotian., ep. Hi. 2. 



300 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

fact or allegory ? 1 It is of the essence of a type to suggest an idea, 
as of the antitype to realize it. The narrative of Jonah suggested 
certainly the idea of resurrection after three days, of triumph 
over death, and by suggesting this gave our Lord what His dis- 
course required. Once more, our Lord uses the time before 
the flood' 2 to illustrate the carelessness of men before His 
own coming. He is using the flood here as a typical judgment, 
as elsewhere He uses other contemporary visitations for a like pur- 
pose. In referring to the flood He certainly suggests that He is 
treating it as typical, for He introduces circumstances — ' eating 
and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage ' — which have no 
counterpart in the original narrative. Nothing in his use of it 
depends on its being more than a typical instance. Once more, 
He argues with the Pharisees on the assumption of the Davidic 
authorship of Psalm ex. 3 But it must be noticed that He is asking 
a question rather than making a statement, — a question, moreover, 
which does not admit of being turned into a statement without sug- 
gesting the conclusion, of which rationalistic critics have not hesi- 
tated to avail themselves, that David's Lord could not be David's 
son. There are, we notice, other occasions when our Lord asked 
questions which cannot be made the basis of positive propositions. 4 
It was in fact part of His method to lead men to examine their 
own principles, without at the time suggesting any positive conclu- 
sion at all. It may also fairly be represented, on a review of our 
Lord's teaching as a whole, that if He had intended to convey 
instruction to us on critical and literary questions, He would have 
made His purpose plainer. It is contrary to His whole method to 
reveal His Godhead by any anticipations of natural knowledge. 
The Incarnation was a self-emptying of God to reveal Himself 
under conditions of human nature and from the human point of 
view. We are able to draw a distinction between what He revealed 
and what He used. He revealed God, His mind, His character, 
His claim, within certain limits His Threefold Being ; He revealed 
man, his sinfulness, his need, his capacity; -He revealed His pur- 
pose of redemption, and founded His Church as a home in which 
man was to be through all the ages reconciled to God in knowl- 
edge and love. All this He revealed, but through, and under con- 

1 St. Matt. xii. 40. 2 St. Matt. xxiv. 37-39. 3 St. Matt. xxii. 41-46. 

4 See especially St. Mark x. 17-18 (and parallel passages), where our 
Lord's question, if converted into a positive proposition, suggests a repudi- 
ation of personal goodness. Cf. also the question in St. John x. 34-36, 
where, though the argument is h fortiori, still the true character of our Lord's 
sonship is hardly suggested. 



vin. The Holy Spirit and Inspiration. 301 

ditions of, a true human nature. Thus He used human nature, its 
relation to God, its conditions of experience, its growth in knowl- 
edge, its limitation of knowledge. 1 He feels as we men ought to 
feel ; He sees as we ought to see. We can thus distinguish more 
or less between the Divine truth which He reveals, and the human 
nature which He uses. Now when He speaks of the ' sun rising ' 
He is using ordinary human knowledge. He willed so to re- 
strain the beams of Deity as to observe the limits of the science 
of His age, and He puts Himself in the same relation to its histori- 
cal knowledge. Thus He does not reveal His eternity by state- 
ments as to what had happened in the past, or was to happen 
in the future, outside the ken of existing history. 2 He made His 
Godhead gradually manifest by His attitude towards men and 
things about Him, by His moral and spiritual claims, by His 
expressed relation to His Father, not by any miraculous exemp- 
tions of Himself from the conditions of natural knowledge in its 
own proper province. Thus the utterances of Christ about the Old 
Testament do not seem to be nearly definite or clear enough to 
allow of our supposing that in this case He is departing from the 
general method of the Incarnation, by bringing to bear the unveiled 
omniscience of the Godhead, to anticipate or foreclose a develop- 
ment of natural knowledge. 

But if we thus plead that theology may leave the field open for 
free discussion of these questions which Biblical criticism has re- 
cently been raising, we shall probably be bidden to ' remember 
Tubingen,' and not be over-trustful of a criticism which at least 
exhibits in some of its most prominent representatives a great deal 
of arbitrariness, of love of ' new views ' for their own sake, and a 
great lack of that reverence and spiritual insight which is at least as 
much needed for understanding the books of the Bible, as accurate 
knowledge and fair investigation. To this the present writer would 

1 This limitation of knowledge must not be confused with fallibility or lia- 
bility to human delusion, because it was doubtless guarded by the Divine 
purpose which led Jesus Christ to take it upon Himself. 

2 Of course He gave prophetic indications of the coming judgment, but on 
the analogy of inspired prophecy. He did not reveal ' times and seasons,' and 
declared that it was not within the scope of His mission to do so. See esp. 
St. Mark xiii. 32. He exhibits supernatural insight into men's characters 
and lives ; but He never exhibits the omniscience of bare Godhead in the 
realm of natural knowledge, such as would be required to anticipate the re- 
sults of modern science or criticism. This ' self-emptying ' of God in the 
Incarnation is, we must always remember, no failure of power, but a contin- 
uous act of Self-sacrifice ; cf. 2 Cor. viii. 9 and Phil. ii. 7. Indeed God 
'declares His almighty power most chiefly' in this Condescension, whereby 
He ' beggared Himself ' of Divine prerogatives, to put Himself in our place. 



302 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

be disposed to reply that, if the Christian Church has been enabled 
to defeat the critical attack, so far as it threatened destruction to 
the historical basis of the New Testament, it has not been by fore- 
closing the question with an appeal to dogma, but by facing in 
fair and frank discussion the problems raised. A similar treatment 
of Old Testament problems will enable us to distinguish between 
what is reasonable and reverent, and what is high-handed and irre- 
ligious in contemporary criticism, whether German, French, or 
English. Even in regard to what makes prima facie a reasonable 
claim, we do not prejudice the decision by declaring the field open ; 
in all probability there will always remain more than one school of 
legitimate opinion on the subject ; indeed, the purpose of the latter 
part of this essay has not been to inquire how much we can without 
irrationality believe inspiration to involve ; but rather, how much 
may legitimately and without real loss be conceded. For, without 
doubt, if consistently with entire loyalty to our Lord and His 
Church, we can regard as open the questions specified above, we 
are removing great obstacles from the path to belief of many who 
certainly wish to believe, and do not exhibit any undue scepticism. 
Nor does there appear to be any real danger that the criticism of 
the Old Testament will ultimately diminish our reverence for it. In 
the case of the New Testament certainly we are justified in feeling 
-that modern investigation has resulted in immensely augmenting 
our understanding of the different books, and has distinctly fortified 
and enriched our sense of their inspiration. Why then should 
we hesitate to believe that the similar investigation of the Old Tes- 
tament will in its result similarly enrich our sense that ' God in 
divers portions and divers manners spake of old times unto the 
fathers,' and that the Inspiration of Holy Scriptures will always be 
recognized as the most conspicuous of the modes in which the 
Holy Spirit has mercifully wrought for the illumination and encour- 
agement of our race ? 

1 For whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for 
our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the Scriptures 
might have hope.' 



IX. 
THE CHURCH. 



WALTER LOCK. 



IX. 

THE CHURCH. 

Christianity claims to be at once a life, a truth, and a worship ; 
and, on all these accounts, it needs must find expression in a 
church. For, in the first place, the life of an individual remains 
dwarfed and stunted as long as it is lived in isolation \ it is in its 
origin the outcome of other lives ; it is at every moment of its exis- 
tence dependent upon others ; it reaches perfection only when it 
arrives at a conscious sense of its own deficiencies and limitations, 
and, therefore, of its dependence, and through such a sense realizes 
with thankfulness its true relation to the rest of life around it. 
Again, the knowledge of truth comes to the individual first through 
the mediation of others, of his parents and teachers ; as he grows, 
and his own intellect works more freely, yet its results only gain 
consistency, security, width, when tested by the results of other 
workers ; and directly we wish to propagate these results, they 
must be embodied in the lives of others, in societies, in organiza- 
tions. Without these, ideas remain in the air, abstract, intangible, 
appealing perhaps to the philosophic few, but high above the reach 
of the many, the simple. ' All human society is the receptacle, 
nursery, and dwelling-place of ideas, shaped and limited according 
to the nature of the society — ideas which live and act on it and in 
it ; which are preserved, passed on, and transmitted from one por- 
tion of it to another, from one generation to another ; which would 
be merely abstractions or individual opinions if they were not en- 
dowed with the common life which their reception in a society 
gives them.' x 

These two principles are, obviously, not confined to religious 
questions. They apply to morality, to society, to politics. They 
are assumed in all ethical and political treatises. The need of co- 
operation for common life underlies the whole structure of the 

*The Dean^of St. Paul's on The Christian Church (Oxford House 
Papers, No. xvii.), where this truth is excellently worked out and applied 
to the Church. 

20 



306 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

Republic of Plato ; it is implied in Aristotle's definition of man as 
a social animal, and in his close association of Ethics with Politics : 
it has created the family, the tribe, the state ; each fresh assertion 
of the principle, each breaking down of the barriers which separate 
family from family, tribe from tribe, nation from nation, has been a 
step forward in civilization. The strength of co-operation for the 
propagation of ideas is seen in the persistence with which certain 
nations retain hold on political theories or peculiar features of 
character; it is seen in the recurring formation of philosophic 
schools or religious sects or guilds, as soon as any new truth, intel- 
lectual or religious, has been discovered, or any moral quality, such 
as temperance or purity, has needed to be emphasized. The most 
individualistic of Christian sects have found themselves forced to 
be ecclesiastical, to define their creeds, and to perfect their organi- 
zation, as soon as they have begun to be missionary. 

These principles are as wide as society ; but religion takes them 
up and applies them on the highest level. Religion is, almost uni- 
versally, the link which binds man to man, no less than that which 
binds man to a Power above him. So in the Christian Church — 
if we may anticipate, for a moment, our special application of the 
principle — the new-born child is taken at once and incorporated 
into a body of believers ; from the first it draws its life from God 
through the body ; it is taught that throughout life it must keep 
in touch with the body ; it must be in a right relation to the other 
members ; it must draw life from them ; it must contribute life to 
them. And, further, this body has existed always and exists still as 
the home of certain ideas y ideas about God and about human life, 
which were revealed in Jesus Christ, and which it has to attest in 
its teaching and embody in its life. It is to be a body of visible 
persons, themselves the light of the world, expressing so that others 
can see the manifold wisdom of God, winning others to belief in 
the unity of God, by the sight of their own oneness. The first 
principle might be expressed in the words of Festus to Paracelsus, 
when the latter had claimed to be God's special instrument in the 
world : — 

' Were I elect like you, 
I would encircle me with love, and raise 
A rampart of my fellows : it should seem 
Impossible for me to fail, so watched 
By gentle friends who made their cause my own. 
They should ward off fate's envy : — the great gift, 
Extravagant when claimed by me alone, 
Being so a gift to them as well as me ; ' x 

1 Browning, Paracelsus, ii. p. 30, ed. 18SS. 



ix. The Church. 307 

the second principle by lines applied originally to the Incarnation, 
but which we may legitimately transfer to the Church, which con- 
tinues the work of the Incarnation, — 

1 And so the Word had breath, and wrought 
With human hands the Creed of Creeds 
In loveliness of perfect deeds, 
More strong than all poetic thought/ 1 

But, further, religion adds a third application of its own to this 
principle of co-operation ; for a church grows also out of the neces- 
sities of worship. The ritual needed for the offering of sacrifice 
almost necessitates of itself a number of persons for its performance. 
No doubt, an individual can worship God in private, but so his 
worship tends to be self-centred and narrow ; for the full expres- 
sion of his religious relation to others, for expiating a wrong done 
by him to his neighbors or to the whole community, for expressing 
gratitude for mercies which have come to him through others, there 
must be the common meeting ; and the community as a whole has 
its great victories for which to thank God, its national dangers for 
which to pray, its national sins for which to offer expiation ; and 
hence, common religious acts have been the universal accompani- 
ment of national life, and have in their turn reacted upon it. 

The idea of a church, then, as conceived in its most general 
form, and without especial reference to the Christian Church, is 
this, that it widens life by deepening the sense of brotherhood ; 
that it teaches, strengthens, and propagates ideas by enshrining 
truth in living witnesses, by checking the results "of isolated think- 
ers by contact with other thinkers, and by securing permanency for 
the ideas ; and that it expands and deepens worship by eliminating 
all that is selfish and narrow, and giving expression to common 
aims and feelings. 

We pass from such a priori ideas to the evidence of the Bible. 
There we find that these principles were embodied first in Judaism. 
There the whole nation was the Church. The Jew entered into 
the religious privileges of his life, not by any conscious act of his 
own, but by being born of Jewish parents ; he retained his true life 
by remaining in contact with his nation. The union of the different 
members of the nation with each other is so intimate that the 
whole nation is spoken of as a personal unit. It is called l God's 
Son,' His 'first-born Son/ 'Jehovah's servant.' The ideal of 
prophecy is essentially that of a restored nation rejoicing in the 
rule of national righteousness. Again, the nation was chosen out 

1 Tennyson, In Memoriam, xxxvi. 



308 The Religion of the Incarnation, 

specially to bear witness to truth, truth about the nature of God, 
the Almighty, the Eternal, the Holy ; truth embodied in the facts 
of history, and deepened in the revelations of prophecy; truths 
which the fathers teach their children, ' that they should not hide 
them from the children of the generations to come.' x In the strik- 
ing phrase of St. Athanasius, the law and the prophets were ' a 
sacred school of the knowledge of God and of spiritual life for the 
whole world.' 2 Their worship, too, was essentially social and 
national. From the first it centred round great national events, 
the fortunes of the harvest, or the crises of national history ; the 
individual was purified from sin that he might be worthy to take 
part in the national service ; the events of the nation's history were 
celebrated in religious hymns ; the capital of the nation became the 
one and only recognized centre for the highest worship. 

But Judaism adds to these principles a further principle of its 
own. It claims that such privileges as were granted to it, were not 
granted to it for its own sake, but that it might be a source of bles- 
sing to all nations ; it assumes that they are on a lower religious 
level than itself; that instead of each nation progressing equally 
along the line of religious life, truth, and worship, other nations 
have fallen backward, and the Jew has been chosen out for a spe- 
cial privilege. It is the principle that God works by ' limitation,' by 
apparent ' exclusiveness,' by that which is in its essence ' sacerdo- 
talism ; ' the principle that God does not give His gifts equally to 
all, but specially to a few, that they may use them for the good of 
the whole. This principle seems at first sight to offend some mod- 
ern abstract ideas of justice and equality ; but the moment we 
examine the facts of life, we find it prevailing universally. Each 
nation has its peculiar gift ; the Greek makes his parallel claim to 
be specially gifted with the love of knowledge and the power of 
artistic expression ; the Roman with the power of rule and the 
belief in law. Or, again, within a single nation, it is the artist who 
enables us to see the beauty of a face or a landscape which had 
escaped us before, — 

' Art was given for that, 
God uses us to help each other so, 
Lending our minds out.' 3 

It is the poet who interprets our inner nature or the magic of the 
external world, and becomes — 

1 Ps. Ixxviii. 3, 4. 2 De Inc., 12. 8 Browning, Fra Lippo LippL 



he sings 



ix. The Church, 309 

' A priest to us all 
Of the wonder and bloom of the world, 
Which we see with his eyes and are glad ; ' x 



' Till the world is wrought 
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.' 2 



And this principle does not stop short of religious influences. 
Conscience is itself a witness to it, as it implies that all parts of 
our nature are not sufficient guides to themselves, but that God 
has gifted one special faculty with power to control the rest. ' Men 
of character,' it has been said, ' are the conscience of the society 
to which they belong.' In the Jewish nation itself, the prophets 
were the circle of Jehovah's friends ; they knew His secrets, they 
kept alive the ideal of the nation. ' What the soul is in the body, 
that are Christians in the world,' was the parallel claim of an 
early apologist. 3 Analogies crowd in, then, on every side, to show 
how rational is this claim on the part of Judaism. 

Revelation only accepts this fact, and adds to it the assertion 
that it is no accident, but a part of the Divine Purpose. It is the 
result of God's election. The Jewish nation, and subsequently the 
Christian Church, is not only a blessing to the rest of the world, 
but it is conscious that it is a blessing. This truth has been 
revealed to it partly to keep it ever-mindful of its sense of depen- 
dence upon the Giver of all good gifts, partly to give it tenacity and 
courage to cling to a gift which it knows to be of inestimable value 
for all mankind. ' The election was simply a method of procedure 
adopted by God in His wisdom by which He designed to fit the 
few for blessing the many, one for blessing all.' 4 

It must be from considerations such as these that we approach 
the foundation of the Christian Church and the Incarnation of our 
Lord Jesus Christ on which it rests. We approach it with the 
expectation that we shall find these principles embodied in it, for 
Christianity sprang directly out of Judaism, and so would naturally 
inherit its principles ; and to go deeper still, the very essence of 
the Incarnation lies in the consecration of human life and human 
means. He who before had been acting invisibly upon the world 
as the Word, implanting life and light in man, now entered visibly 
into human flesh. All tendencies which made for the fulness of 

1 M. Arnold, The Youth of Nature. 

2 Shelley, The Skylark. 

3 Ep. ad Diogn , vi. 

4 Bruce, The Chief End of Revelation, p. 116. 



3io The Religion of the Incarnation. 

life and truth before His coming, all that tended to enlighten, ele- 
vate, combine men, had been His unknown working ; now they 
are known to be His. The Infinite appears in finite form ; the 
spiritual takes the material in which to express itself ; human media 
are consecrated to deeper ends, and charged with a fuller meaning 
than before \ so that, in Hooker's words, ' We cannot now con- 
ceive how God should, without man, exercise Divine power or 
receive the glory of Divine praise.' * ' What you do now even after 
the, flesh, that is spiritual/ is the bold paradox of St. Ignatius; and 
he adds the reason, ' for you do all in Christ Jesus.' 2 Thus — 

' In this twofold sphere, the twofold man 
Holds firmly to the natural, to reach 
The spiritual beyond it . . . 
The whole temporal show related royally 
And built up to eterne significance 
Through the open arms of God.' 3 

The Incarnation, then, takes up all the three principles of which 
we have spoken ; but, from the very finality which it claims for 
itself, it puts a mark of finality upon each of them, and so, in this 
respect, marks off the application of them in the Christian Church 
from all other applications of the same principles. The principle 
of co-operation for spiritual life is taken up ; the Jewish nation is 
expanded into an universal brotherhood ; this includes all men, 
without any distinction of race ; it includes the quick and the 
dead ; it aims at the highest spiritual perfection. It is final in this 
sense, that nothing can be wider in extent or deeper in aim ; but 
it is final also in the sense that the life has been manifested. 
Christians do not combine to work up to some unsuspected ideal ; 
they combine -to draw out and express in their common life the 
perfection that was in Christ. The principle of association for the 
propagation of ideas is taken up, but they are truths about God 
and His relation to human nature ; they are truths which have 
been revealed, which have been once for all delivered to the saints. 
Finally, the principle of association for worship is taken up ; the 
worship is made as wide as humanity ; it is to be as spiritual as 
God ; but it, too, rests on final facts, on the facts of creation and 
redemption ; it centres round the one complete sacrifice for sin. 

1 Eccl. Pol., v. 54. Cf. Iren., adv. Haer., iii. 20 : ' Gloria enim hominis 
Deus; operationis vero Dei et omnis sapientiae Ejus et virtutis receptaculum 
homo.' 

2 Ign., ad Eph., viii. a Se koX Kara (rdpKa irpdffffere, ravra irvevfiaTUcd i<rriV 
iv 'It)(Tov yap Xpirrrq} irdvra 7rpd<T(reTe- 

3 Aurora Leigh, vii. p. 302. 



ix. The Church. 311 

Let us consider each of these points more in detail. 

I. The Church is an organization for the purpose of spiritual 
life ; an universal brotherhood knit together to build up each of its 
members into holiness ; ' the only great school of virtue existing.' 
But if this is so, if it is universal, is the principle of ' limitation,' 
of ' exclusiveness,' gone? Certainly not. It is there, and it is 
most instructive to notice how it arises. 1 Christ chose a small 
body of disciples to be in close contact with Himself, to share 
His work, and to receive His deeper teaching. This will not sur- 
prise us after the analogies of the prophets, the poets, the artists 
of the world. The saints too may be few, and God may lend 
their spirits out for the good of others. But, moreover, in the 
first formation of the Church we are able to watch the process of 
limitation, as historically worked out ; and we see that it arises not 
from any narrowness, any grudging of His blessings, on the part 
of Christ, but from the narrowness, the limitations in man. Man 
is ' straitened,' not in God, not in Christ, but in his own affections. 
God willed all men to be saved ; Christ went about doing good 
and calling all to a change of heart, to a share in the kingdom of 
heaven ; but such a call made demands upon His hearers ; it 
required that they should give up old prejudices about the Mes- 
sianic kingdom, that they should be willing to leave father and 
mother and houses and lands for the truth's sake, that they should 
lay aside all the things that defile a man, that they should aim at 
being perfect, that they should not only hear but understand the 
word, that they should trust Him even when His sayings were 
hard. And these demands produced the limitations. The Phari- 
sees preferred the glory of men to the glory which came from 
God ; the masses in Galilee cared only for the bread that perisheth ; 
many of the disciples turned back ; and so He could not commit 
Himself unto them, because He knew what was in man. Not to 
them, not to any chance person, but to the Twelve, to those who 
had stood these tests, to those who had, in spite of all perplexity, 
seen in Him the Son of the Living God, to them He could com- 
mit Himself, they could share His secrets ; they could be taught 
clearly the certainty and the meaning of His coming death, for 
they had begun to learn what self-sacrifice meant ; they could do 
His work and organize His Church ; they could bind and loose 
in His Name; they could represent Him when He was gone. 
These are the elect ; they who had the will to listen to the call ; 2 

1 Cp. H. S. Holland, Creed and Character, Sermons III.-VIIL 

2 Tldurcav to'vvv avdpwTcwv K€K\7]/J.4yuv, oi viraKOVfftu fiovXTjdevres, k\t)to\ 
vvofida-drjaav, Clem. Alex., Strom., I. xviii. 89. 



312 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

they who were ' magnanimous to correspond with heaven : ' to them 
He gave at Pentecost the full conscious gift of the Holy Spirit, and 
so at last formed them into the Church, the Church which was to 
continue His work, which was to convey His grace, which was to 
go into the whole world, holding this life as a treasure for the sake 
of the whole world, praying and giving thanks for all men, because 
the unity of God and the unity of the mediation of Christ inspires 
them with hope that all may be one in Him. 1 

The day of Pentecost was thus the birthday of the Church. 
Before there were followers of the Lord; now there was the 
Church ; and this as the result of a new act, for which all that 
preceded had been but preparation; now the Church was born 
in becoming the possessor of a common corporate life. The 
Spirit was given to the whole body of Christians together ; it was 
not given to an individual here and there in such a way that such 
Spirit-bearing individuals could then come together and form a 
Church. It was given corporately, so that they who received the 
Spirit realized at once a unity which preceded any individual 
action of their own. So the Church has gone forth offering its 
message freely to all; in Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor 
Gentile ; the message is given openly, ' without any veil/ to all ; 
all are accepted who will submit themselves to Baptism, i. e., all who 
recognize the element of evil and of weakness in their own life, 
who are willing to die to it and receive fresh life and strength from 
the Risen Lord, and to submit their life to His discipline. That is 
the Church as presented to us in the New Testament. Metaphor 
after metaphor is lavished upon it by our Lord and by St. Paul in 
order to make clear the conception of it. He is the Vine, His 
disciples are the branches ; they draw all their life from Him ; 
apart from Him they can do nothing ; if in union with Him, they 
bear fruit. The Church is a household, a scene of active work, 
of ' skilled and trained activity ; ' each member with his own work, 
some as mere members of the household, others as rulers set over 
the household to give them meat in due season, each with talents 
to be used faithfully for the Master. It is a family, in which 'all 
ye are brethren,' laying obligations of love between brother and 
brother, calling out self-sacrifice for the good of others, deepening 
in each the sense of the value of the lives of others. It is the Body 
of Christ, that which grows stronger and stronger, that which draws 
its life from the Head and must hold to Him, that in which Chris- 
tian is linked to Christian in sympathy and complete interdepend- 
ence, that without which the Head would be incomplete, the neces- 
i Cp. I Tim. ii. 1-6. 



ix. The Church, 313 

sary organ for completing Christ's work on earth, that which the 
Spirit takes as its channel for manifesting to the world the very 
1 life of God.' It is God's Temple ; visible, made up of parts, 
which are fitted in to one another in symmetry ; beautiful with a 
spiritual beauty; for there a living God is present; there He 
speaks to His own ; there they offer to Him a rational service. 1 
It is the Bride of Christ, the dearest object of Christ's love, which 
gives herself to Him for His service, which for His sake keeps her- 
self pure in life and doctrine ; which receives from Him all the 
treasures of His love, so that as He had received the fulness of 
God, 'the aggregate of the Divine attributes, virtues, and energies' 
from the Father, the Church receives all this from Him and 
manifests it forth to the world of men and of angels. 

But this, picture, it will be urged, is only a prophecy of the future ; 
the evidence of St. Paul's Epistles will also show us a very different 
scene in real life, a body with tendencies to divisions, to selfishness, 
to sin. This is quite true, but the ideal is never thought of as 
something different from the real ; the ideal is not simply in heaven, 
nor the real simply on earth ; the real is the ideal, though not yet 
completely developed ; the ideal is the actual basis of the real, as 
much as the goal to which the real is tending. The members of 
the Church have been consecrated; they are holy; they are 
' unleavened ; ' they have put on Christ ; they have by their self- 
committal to Him received a righteousness which they can work 
out into perfection. Again, they are brothers ; they have been 
made children of God by adoption; as they have realized the 
sense of sonship, they realize also the closeness of the tie between 
themselves and the other sons, their common sympathies, hopes, 
and aims. True, they are not yet perfect either in holiness or in 
love ; the very purpose of the Church is to make them perfect. 
It takes the individual at his birth, it incorporates him into its own 
life, it watches over him from beginning to end, it feeds him with 
spiritual food, it disciplines him by spiritual laws, it blesses him at 
all the chief moments of life, it takes him away from his own isola- 
tion, trains him in social aims and social duties by social sacraments ; 
finally, gives him back to God with its benediction. 

Such a conception of the Church as a nursery, a school, a 
home, implies of necessity that it should be visible, and that it 
should be one. It is a visible body, because it has in some sense 
to represent the Incarnate Lord. In the Incarnation spirit took 

1 For the whole of this last paragraph cf. H. S. Holland, On Behalf of 
Belief, Sermons VI. and VII. 



314 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

material form and expressed itself thereby ; in the risen Lord — 
and it is the risen Lord who gives the Spirit to the Church — there 
was still a spiritual body. This is not to deny the invisible reality 
of spiritual unity which underlies the external visible unity. It is 
only to say that completeness means both. In the language of 
St. Ignatius, as Christ Jesus was at once material and spiritual, so 
the unity of the Church should be at once material and spiritual. 1 

The idea of an invisible Church to express the body of true 
believers, who alone are the Church, to whatever community they 
belong, so that the visible Church becomes an unimportant thing, 
is an idea entirely at variance with Scripture and all pre-reforma- 
tion teaching. The phrase is first found in almost contemporary 
writings of Luther and of Zwingli ; it is akin to the teaching of 
Hus and of Wiclif ; and, no doubt, there are thoughts and phrases 
in earlier writers that are more or less akin to it. From the first 
there was obviously a distinction between the true and untrue 
Christian, between the spiritual and the fleshly, between the vessels 
to honor and the vessels to dishonor ; and the first of these classes, 
those who persevere to the end, whom man cannot know and 
God only knows, those who, if thought of in the light of God's 
eternal purposes, are the predestined, these were treated and 
spoken of as ' the Church properly so-called,' ' the true body of 
Christ.' Christians ' who do the will of the Father will belong to 
the first Church, the spiritual Church founded before the sun and 
moon.' Those who have lived in perfect righteousness according 
to the Gospel ' will rest in the holy hill of God, in the highest 
Church, in which are gathered the philosophers of God.' 2 

Again, the Church on earth is regarded as ' a copy of the 
Church in heaven in which God's will is done : ' but in each case 
there is no contrast between the visible and the invisible Church. 
The invisible Church is in these cases either the ideal of the 
visible ; or that part of the visible organized Church which has 
remained true to its aims. So too with regard to those who are 
not conscious believers ; the possibility of their salvation, in a 
qualified way, is heartily recognized, but the confusion is not made 
of calling them members of the Church. 

The fatal danger is when the belief in the invisible Church is 

1 St. Ignatius, ad Eph., viii. : ets larpSs icrri, crapKiicbs kol\ irv^vfiariKSs, as 
compared with ad Magn., xiii. : 'tva evaxris y aapiwc-f) tc /cot Trvev/xariK-fi. 

2 Pseudo-Clem. Rom., Ep. ii 14; Clem. Alex., Str., vi. 14; iv. 8. For 
these and other illustrations cf. Seeberg, Der Begriff der christlichen Kirche 
(Erlangen, 1885), cap. i. ; and Gore, Church and the Ministry, ed. i. pp. 19^ 
28, 136. 



ix. The Church, 315 

sued to discredit the visible Church and the importance of belong- 
ing to it. It is scarcely too much to say that all stress laid upon 
the invisible Church tends to lower the demands of holiness and 
brotherhood. It is a visible Church, and such a Church as can 
attract outsiders, which calls out the fruits of faith into active 
energy ; it is a visible Church such as can combine Christians in 
active work, which tests brotherhood, which rubs away idiosyn- 
crasy, which destroys vanity and jealousy, which restrains personal 
ambition, which trains in the power of common work, which, as 
our own powers fail, or are proved inadequate, for some task on 
which our heart had been set, still fills us with hope that God will 
work through others that which it is clear He will not work 
through us. It is a visible Church alone which is ' the home of 
the lonely.' Encompassed as we are now from our birth by 
Christian friends and associations, we tend to forget how much we 
depend on the spiritual help and sympathy of others. The great- 
ness of our blessings blinds us to their presence, and we seem to 
stand in our own strength while we are leaning upon others. The 
relation of the soul to God is a tender thing ; personal religion, 
which seems so strong, while in a Christian atmosphere, tends to 
grow weak, to totter, to fall, as we stand alone in some distant 
country, amid low moral standards and heathen faiths. Such 
solitude does indeed often, in those who are strong, deepen, in a 
marvellous way, the invisible communion with God and the ties 
that knit us with the absent ; but the result is often fatal to the 
weak. It throws both strong and weak alike into closer sympathy 
with those who share a common faith. It is a visible Church 
which supplies this sympathy, which gives the assurance that each 
soul, as it is drawn to God, shall not stand alone ; but that it shall 
find around it strengthening hands and sympathetic hearts, which 
shall train it till, as in the qwiet confidence of a home, it shall 
blossom into the full Christian life. 

The principle of the unity of the Church is very similar. That, 
again, is primarily and essentially a spiritual unity. The ultimate 
source is, according to the Lord's own teaching, the unity of the 
Godhead : ' that they may be one, even as we are one.' The 
effect of the outpouring of the Spirit is to make the multitude of 
them that believed 'of one heart and one soul.' Baptism becomes 
the source of unity, ' In one Spirit were we all baptized into one 
body : ' the ( one bread ' becomes the security of union. ' We 
who are many are one bread, one body, for we all partake of the 
one bread.' More fully still is the unity drawn out in the Epistle 
to the Ephesians. ' There is one body and one Spirit, even as ye 



316 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

are called in one hope of our calling, one Lord, one faith, one 
baptism, one God and Father of all' The unity starts with being 
spiritual ; it is the power of the One God drawing men together 
by His action upon their spirits, uniting them in the service of 
one Lord Who has redeemed them ; but it issues in ' one body.' 
Nothing can be stronger than the assertion of such unity. But in 
what does this unity lie, and what is to be the safeguard of it? 
No one answer is possible to this question. Clearly, one part of 
the answer is, a unity of spiritual aim, ' one hope of your calling : ' 
another answer is, a common basis of belief, common trust in the 
same Lord, ■ one faith ; ' a further answer is, common social sacra- 
ments, * one baptism,' ' one bread/ All these lie on the face of 
these passages of St. Paul. Are we to add to them ' a common 
government,' 'an apostolical succession'? Was this of the essence 
or a late addition, a result of subsequent confederation intended 
to guarantee the permanence of dogma? No doubt, the circum- 
stances of subsequent history moulded the exact form of the 
ministry, and emphasized the importance of external organization 
under particular circumstances ; but this is no less true of the 
other points of unity ; the unity of spiritual life was worked out in 
one way in the times of public discipline and penance, in another 
way when these fell into disuse : the unity of faith was brought 
into prominence in the times of the formulating of the Creeds. 
So the unity of external organization was emphasized when it was 
threatened by the Gnostic, Novatian, and Donatist controversies. 
But the germ of it is there from the first, and it was no later addi- 
tion. The spiritual unity derived from the Lord is imparted 
through Sacraments ; but this at once links the inward life and 
spiritual unity with some form of external organization. And so 
the writer of the Epistle to the Ephesians, after his great descrip- 
tion of Christian unity, goes on at once to speak of the ministry. 
The apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers, these are 
special gifts of the ascended Lord to the Church ; and they are 
given for the very purpose of securing unity, * for the perfecting 
of the saints unto the work of ministering, unto the building up of 
the body of Christ, till we all attain unto the unity of the faith.' 
No less significantly, when St. Paul is applying to the Church the 
metaphor of the body and its members in order to emphasize the 
unity of the whole, does he rank apostles, prophets, teachers, as 
the most important members of the body. 1 

The history of the early Church, so far as it can be traced, 

1 i Cor. xii. 28. 



ix. The Church, 317 

points the same way. The Lord appointed His body of twelve ; 
He gave them the power to bind and to loose, the power to exer- 
cise discipline over offending members of the Church. At first, 
the Christian Church is a purely Jewish body ; it continues in the 
Apostles' fellowship as well as doctrine ; they distribute its alms ; 
they punish unworthy members ; they arrange its differences ; they 
appoint subordinate officers ; they ratify their actions, and sanction 
the admission of Samaritans and proselytes to the Church : but 
the various members throughout Judaea, Galilee, and Samaria are 
embraced in the single conception of one Church. 1 Then under 
the guidance of Paul and Barnabas the Gentiles are brought in 
and formed into churches ; the danger to unity becomes acute. 
According to the Acts of the Apostles, it is surmounted by refer- 
ence to the Church at Jerusalem ; the Apostles and Elders there 
decide the question, and the Gentile Churches are thus kept in 
communion with it. St. Paul's letters, with all the difficulty there 
is of reconciling every detail with the historian's account, present 
us with essentially the same picture. In dealing with his own 
Churches, he claims absolute right, as apostle, to hand on and lay 
down traditions, to punish, to forgive, to govern ; he leaves some 
class of ministers in every Church under his guidance ; each 
Church is to administer discipline over unworthy members. But 
the Churches cannot act independently : the Church at Corinth is 
not to act as though it were the fountain-head of Christianity, or 
the only Gentile Church ; it is to remember the customs in other 
Churches. Further than this, above ' all the Churches,' appears 
already as one body ' the Church ' in which God has set Apostles. 2 
Within it there are separate spheres of work, — Paul and Barnabas 
are to go to the Gentiles, the leading Jewish apostles to the Jews ; 
St. Paul will not intrude beyond the province assigned to him ; he 
makes his Gentile Churches to contribute to the needs of the Jewish 
Church, and realize the debt which they owe to them. Any divi- 
sions in a local Church cannot be tolerated, as being inconsistent 
with the unity of Christ, with His cross, and with the significance 
of baptism. Peter stands condemned when he wishes to separate 
himself, and so causes division between Jew and Gentile. 

The importance attached to external organization is surely 
implied in all of this, and the circumstances of the second century 
forced out into clearness what was so implied. Gnosticism, 

1 Cp. Acts ix. 31 77 iKK\r](ria Had* '6\t]9 rrjs 'lovdalas na\ Ta\i\aias Ka\ 
"Sa/xapeias. 

2 1 Cor. xii. 28, xv. 9; Gal. i. 13 ; Phil. iii. 6 ; Eph. i. 22, iii. 10, 21 ; Col. L 
18, 24; 1 Tim. iii. 15. 



318 The Religion of the Incarnation, 

Montanism, Novatianism, — all tended to found new bodies, which 
claimed to be the true Church. How was the individual Christian 
to test their claims? It was in the face of this question that 
Church writers — notably St. Cyprian and St. Irenseus — empha- 
sized the importance of historical continuity in the Church as 
secured by the apostolical succession of the episcopate. The 
unity of the Church came primarily, they urged, from God, from 
heaven, from the Father ; it was secured by the foundation of the 
Church upon the Apostles ; the bishops have succeeded to the 
Apostles, and so become the guardians of the unity of the Church. 
As soon then as we find the Christian episcopate universally organ- 
ized, we find it treated as an institution received from the Apostles, 
and as carrying with it the principle of historic continuity. So it 
has remained ever since, side by side with the other safeguards of 
unity, — the sacraments and the common faith. The Roman 
Church has added to it what seemed a further safeguard of unity, 
the test of communion with itself; but this was a later claim, — a 
claim which was persistently resented, and which was urged with 
disastrous results. The Reformed Churches of the Continent, in 
their protest against that additional test, have rejected the whole 
principle of historic continuity ; they have remained satisfied with 
the bond of a common faith and of common sacraments ; but the 
result can scarcely be said to be as yet a securer unity. Even an 
Unitarian historian recognizes heartily that the characteristic of the 
Church in England is this continuity. ' There is no point,' urges 
Mr. Beard, 1 ' at which it can be said, Here the old Church ends, 
here the new begins. . . . The retention of the Episcopate by the 
English Reformers at once helped to preserve this continuity and 
marked it in the distinctest way. ... It is an obvious historical 
fact that Parker was the successor of Augustine, just as clearly as 
Lanfranc and Becket.' 

This, then, is what the Church claims to be as the home of 
grace, the channel of spiritual life. It claims to be a body of liv- 
ing persons who have given themselves up to the call of Christ to 
carry on His work in the world ; a body which was organized by 
Himself thus far that the Apostles were put in sole authority over 
it ; a body which received the Spirit to dwell within it at Pente- 
cost ; a body which propagated itself by spiritual birth ; a body in 
which the ministerial power was handed on by the Apostles to 
their successors, which has remained so organized till the present 
day, and has moved on through the world, sometimes allied with, 

1 Hibbert Lectures, 1883, p. 311. 



ix. The Church. 319 

sometimes in separation from, the State, always independent of it ; 
a body which lays on each of its members the duty of holiness and 
the obligation of love, and trains them in both. 

But two objections arise here which must be dealt with shortly. 
It is urged, first, this is an unworthy limitation ; we ought to love 
all men, to treat all men as brothers ; why limit this love, this feel- 
ing of brotherhood to the baptized, to the Church? True, we 
ought to love and honor all men, to do good to all men. The 
love of the Christian, like the love of Christ, knows no limits ; but 
the limitations are in man himself. All human nature is not lova- 
ble; all men are not love-worthy. Love must, at least, mean a 
different thing ; it must weaken its connotation if applied to all 
men ; there may be pity, there may be faith, there may be a pro- 
phetic anticipating love for the sinner and the criminal, as we 
recall their origin and forecast the possibilities of their future ; but 
love in the highest sense, — love that delights in and admires its 
object, love that is sure of a response, the sense of brotherhood 
which knows that it can trust a brother, — these are not possible 
with the wanton, the selfish, the hypocrite. Though man has 
social instincts which draw him into co-operation with others, he 
has also tendencies to selfishness and impurity which work against 
the spirit of brotherhood and make it impossible. Not till we 
have some security that the man's real self is on the side of un- 
selfishness can we trust him ; and baptism, with its gifts of grace, 
baptism with its death to the selfish nature, baptism with its pro- 
fession of allegiance to the leadership of Christ, this, at least, 
gives us some security. Even Comte, with his longing for brother- 
hood, tells us that in forming our conception of humanity we must 
not take in all men, but those only who are really assimilable, in 
virtue of a real co-operation towards the common existence ; and 
Mr. Cotter Morison would eliminate and suppress those who have 
no altruistic affection. We limit, then, only so far as seems neces- 
sary to gain reality ; we train men in the narrower circle of brother- 
hood that they may become enthusiasts for it, and go forth as 
missionaries to raise others to their own level. As for those who 
lie outside Christianity, the Church, like our Lord Himself in the 
parable of the sheep and the goats, like St. Paul in his anticipation 
of the judgment day, recognizes all the good there is in them ; 
like Justin Martyr and many of the early Fathers, it traces in them 
the work of the Divine Word • and yet none the less did these 
writers claim, and does the Church still claim for itself, the con- 
scious gift of spiritual life, in a sense higher than anything that lies 
outside itself. 



320 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

But many who would follow thus far would draw another line, 
and would include within the Church all the baptized, whether 
professing Churchmen or not. Once more, so far as we draw any 
distinction within the limits of the baptized, it is for the sake of 
reality. We recognize that every atom of their faith is genuine, 
that so far as they have one Lord, one faith, one baptism, they are 
true members of the Church ; that so far as they have banded 
themselves together into a society, they have something akin to 
the- reality of the Church, and gain some of its social blessings. 
But then it is they who have banded themselves together into a 
society; and that means they have done it at their own risk. 
We rest upon the validity of our sacraments, because they were 
founded by the Lord Himself, because they have His special 
promises, because they have been handed down in regular and 
valid channels to us. Have they equal security that their sacraments 
are valid ? Again, we must hold that schism means something 
of evil ; that it causes weakness ; that it thus prevents the full 
work of brotherhood, of knitting Christian with Christian in com- 
mon worship ; that so it prevents the complete witness of the 
Church in the world ; that in so far as such Christians are schis- 
matic, they are untrue and harmful members of the Church. The 
full complete claim of the Church is that it is a body visibly meet- 
ing together in a common life, and forming by historical continuity 
a part of the actual body founded by our Lord Himself. It would 
be unreal to apply this conception of a complete historic brother- 
hood to those who have separated themselves from the Church's 
worship, and whose boast is that they were founded by Wesley, 
or Luther, or Calvin. A Church so founded is not historically 
founded by Christ; it may have been founded to carry on the 
work of Christ, it may have been founded in imitation of Him, 
and with the sincerest loyalty to His person, but it cannot be 
said to have been founded by Him. Even if circumstances 
have justified it, it is at any rate not the ideal ; and whatever con- 
fessions the historic Church may have to make of its own short- 
comings, it still must witness to the ideal of a visible unity and 
historical continuity. Amid the divisions of Christendom, and in 
face of her own shortcomings, the Church of England does not 
claim to be the full complete representation of the Church of 
Christ. She is only one national expression of the Catholic 
Church; she feels that 'it is safer for us to widen the pale of the 
kingdom of God than to deny the fruits of the Spirit ; ' * she has 

1 Bp. Forbes, Explanation of the Nicene Creed, p. 290. 



ix. The Church. 321 

ever on her lips the prayer, ' Remember not, Lord, our offences, nor 
the offences of our forefathers, neither take vengeance of our sins ; ' 
and yet she must make her claim boldly and fearlessly to have re- 
tained the true ideal of the Church ; to be loyal to the essential prin- 
ciple that her life comes historically from Christ, and not from man. 

II. But the Church is the school of truth as well as the school 
of virtue. Its ministers form a priesthood of truth as well as a 
priesthood of sacrifice. Its priests' lips have * to keep knowledge.' 
Christianity is, as the school of Alexandria loved to represent it, a 
Divine philosophy, and the Church its school. 

This conception of the Church starts from our Lord's own 
words. His Apostles are to be as scribes instructed unto the 
kingdom of Heaven ; they are to have the scribes' power to decide 
what is and what is not binding in the kingdom ; the Spirit is to 
lead them into all truth ; they are to make disciples of all the 
nations, ' teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I com- 
manded you.' The function of the Church then with regard to 
truth is primarily to bear witness to that which has been revealed. 
It. does not primarily reveal, it tells of the truths which have been 
embodied in the historic life of Jesus Christ or explained in His 
teaching. ' One is its teacher ; One is its master, even the Christ.' 
It holds a ' faith once delivered to the saints/ Hence, from the 
first, there grew up some quasi-authoritative formula, in which we 
can see the germ of the later Creeds, which each Christian Mis- 
sionary would teach to his converts. St. Paul himself received 
from others and handed on to the Corinthians, as his first message 
to them, some such half-stereotyped Creed, narrating the central 
facts of the Death and Resurrection of the Lord ; his teaching 
was as a mould which shaped the lives of the converts as they were 
poured, like so much molten metal, into it. It was authoritative, 
not even an angel from heaven could preach another gospel. As 
time went on, and false teaching spread, this side of the Church's 
work is emphasized more and more. The Church is to be the 
pillar and ground-work of the truth. Timothy and Titus are to 
hold fast the deposit to prevent false teaching, to secure whole- 
someness of doctrine no less than sobriety of life. 

The contests of the next centuries bring out this idea of witness 
into clearer prominence, and the Episcopate, as it had been the 
guarantee of unity, becomes now the guarantee of truth. Thus, 
St. Ignatius is face to face with Docetic and Gnostic teaching ; with 
him the bishops are 'in the mind of Jesus Christ;' they are to be 
treated 'as the Lord ; ' to avoid heresy, it is necessary to avoid 
1 separation from the God of Jesus Christ, from the Bishop and the 

21 



322 The Religion of the Incarnation, 

ordinances of the Apostles ; ' the one Bishop is ranked with the 
one Eucharist, the one flesh of Jesus Christ, the one cup, the one 
altar, as the source of unity; submission to the Bishop and the 
Presbyters is a means towards holiness, towards spiritual strength 
and spiritual joy. 1 These are incidental expressions in letters 
written at a moment of spiritual excitement; but the same appeal 
reappears in calmer controversial treatises. St. Irenaeus argues 
against Gnosticism on exactly the same grounds. Truth is essen- 
tially a thing received ; it was received by the Apostles from Christ. 
He was the truth Himself; He revealed it to His Apostles; they 
embodied it in their writings and handed it on to the Bishops and 
Presbyters who succeeded them ; hence the test of truth is to be 
sought in Holy Scripture and in the teaching of those Churches 
which were founded directly by the Apostles. 2 With equal strength 
Tertullian urges that the truth was received by the churches from 
the Apostles, by the Apostles from Christ, by Christ from God ; it 
is therefore independent of individuals ; it must be sought for in 
Holy Scripture ; but as the canon of that is not fixed, and its 
interpretation is at times doubtful, it must be supplemented by the 
evidence of the Apostolic Churches ; and he challenges the heretics 
to produce the origin Of their churches and show that the series of 
bishops runs back to some Apostle or Apostolic man. 3 

The Church is thus primarily a witness : the strength of its au- 
thority lies in the many sides from which the witness comes : but 
the exigencies of controversy, and indeed of thought even apart 
from controversy, rendered necessary another function in respect 
to truth. The Church was compelled to formulate, to express 
its witness in relation to the intellectual difficulties of the time. 
Christianity is indeed essentially a matter not of the intellect, but 
of the will, a personal relation of trust in a personal God. Its first 
instinct is, as the first instinct of friendship would be, to resent 
intellectual analysis and dogmatic definition. But as the need of 
telling others about a friend, or defending him against slander, 
would compel us to analyze his qualities and define his attractive- 
ness; so it was with the Church's relation to the Lord. It bore 
witness to the impression which His life had made upon His fol- 
lowers that He was Divine ; it bore witness to the facts of the life 
that attested it, and to His own statements. But the claim was 
denied ; it needed justifying ; it needed to be shown to be con- 

1 Ad Eph., ii. iii. vi. xx.j ad Trail., vii. xiii ; ad Phil., iv. vii.; ad Smyrn., 
viii. ix. 

2 Irenaeus, adv. Hser., cp. esp. i. io, ii. 9, iii. 1, 2, 3, 5, 12, 24. 

3 Prasscript. adv. Haereticos; cp. esp. 3, 6, 15-21. 



ix. The Church. 323 

sistent with other truths, such as the unity of God, and the reality 
of His own human nature, and so definition was forced upon the 
Church. The germ of such definitions is found in the New Testa- 
ment ; the deeper Christological teaching of the Epistles to the 
Ephesians and to the Colossians, and of the prologue of St. John, 
are instances of such intellectual analysis and formulation, and 
were evidently written in the face of controversy. The technical 
decisions of the great councils of the fourth and fifth centuries and 
their expression in the Nicene and ' Athanasian ' Creeds are the 
outcome of the same tendency. Yet even in them the Church 
acts, in a sense, as a witness ; the Scriptures are appealed to as 
the ultimate authority ; the Creed is the summary of its chief doc- 
trines ; the one aim is to secure and express the truth witnessed to 
by churches throughout the world, to eliminate novelty and caprice ; 
the new definitions are accepted, because they alone are felt to 
express the instinct of the Church's worship. By this time the 
canon of Holy Scripture was fixed. It becomes thenceforth an 
undying fountain of life, from which the water of pure doctrine can be 
drawn. Tradition and development can always be checked by that. 
In the truths then which the Church teaches we may distinguish 
two classes. First, there are the central truths to which it bears 
absolute witness ; such as the Fatherhood of God, the Person and 
work of Jesus Christ, the Redemption of all mankind, the origin 
and purpose of human life. These it teaches authoritatively. Its 
conduct is exactly analogous to that of a parent teaching the moral 
law to his children ; teaching the commandments authoritatively 
at first, till the child can be educated to understand the reason of 
them. So the Church says to her children, or to those who are 
seeking after truth, ' there is an absolute truth in religion as well as 
in morality; we have tested it; generations of the saints have 
found it true. It is a truth independent of individual teachers ; 
independent of the shifting moods of opinion at any particular 
period ; and you must accept it on our authority first. Further, 
these are truths which affect life, therefore they cannot be appre- 
hended merely by the intellect. You must commit yourself to 
them ; act upon them ; there is a time when the seeker after truth 
sees where it lies ; then it must cease to be an open question. 
" You must seek till you find, but when you have once found truth, 
you must commit yourself to it." 1 You must believe that you 
may understand ; but it is that you may understand.' The dogma 

1 Tertullian, Praescr., 9 : ' Quaerendum est donee invenias, et credendum 
ubi inveneris.' 



324 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

is authoritatively taught, that the individual may be kept safe from 
mere individual caprice and fancifulness, but also that he himself 
may come to a rational understanding of his belief. No doubt 
the truth is so wide that to the end of our lives we shall still feel 
the need of guidance and of teaching. ' As long as we live,' said 
Calvin, ' our weakness will not allow us to be discharged from 
school.' Like St. Ignatius on his way to martyrdom, the Christian 
may feel at his dying day, ' Now I begin to be a disciple ; ■ but 
the . aim of the Church is to make each member have a rational 
hold upon his faith. When we are young, we accept a doctrine 
because the Church teaches it to us ; when we are grown up, we 
love the Church because it taught us the doctrine. ' The Church- 
man never surrenders his individual responsibility. But he may 
and must surrender some portion at least of his independence, 
and he benefits greatly by the surrender.' x ' Submission to the 
authority of the Church is the merging of our mere individualism 
in the whole historic life of the great Christian brotherhood ; it is 
making ourselves at one with the one religion in its most perma- 
nent and least merely local form. It is surrendering our individu- 
ality only to empty it of its narrowness.' 2 

Secondly, there are other truths, which are rather deductions 
from these central points or statements of them in accordance with 
the needs of the age ; such as the mode of the relation of the 
Divine and human natures in Christ, of free-will to predestination, 
or the method of the Atonement, or the nature of the Inspiration 
of Holy Scripture. If, in any case, a point of this kind has con- 
sciously come before the whole Church and been reasoned out 
and been decided upon, such a decision raises it into the higher 
class of truths which are taught authoritatively ; but if this is not 
so, the matter remains an open question. It remains a question 
for the theologians ; it is not imposed on individual Christians ; 
though it may at any time become ripe for decision. The very 
fixity of the great central doctrines allows the Church to give a 
remarkable freedom to individual opinion on all other points. 
Practically, how much wider is the summary of the rule of faith 
as given in Irenaeus (iii. 4), or Tertullian (Prsescr., 13), or Origen 
(De Principiis), or in the Apostles' or Nicene Creed, than the 
tests of orthodoxy that would be imposed in a modern religious 
or scientific circle ! St. Vincent of Lerins is the great champion 
of antiquity as the test of truth ; yet he, who lays it down that ' to 

1 Hawkins' Sermons on the Church, p. 77. 

2 Rev. C. Gore, Roman Catholic Claims, p. 51. 



ix. The Church. 325 

declare any new truth to Catholic Christians over and above that 
which they have received never was allowed, nowhere is allowed, 
and never will be allowed,' also insists on the duty of development, 
of growth, within the true lines of the central truths. ' Is there,' 
he assumes an objector to urge, 'to be no growth within the 
Church? Nay, let there be growth to the greatest extent; who 
would be so grudging to man, such an enemy to God, as to attempt 
to prevent it ; but yet let it be such that it be growth, not change 
of the faith. ... As time goes on, it is right that the old truths 
should be elaborated, polished, filed down ; it is wrong that they 
should be changed, maimed, or mutilated. They should be made 
clear, have light thrown on them, be marked off from each other ; 
but they must not lose their fulness, their entirety, their essential 
character.' 1 So it has happened in the course of the Christian 
history ; doctrines like that of the Atonement have been restated 
afresh to meet the needs of the age. So it is happening still; 
doctrines like that of the method of creation or of the limits of 
inspiration are still before the Church. The Church is slow to 
decide, to formulate ; it stands aside, it reiterates its central truths, 
it says that whatever claims to be discovered must ultimately fit in 
with the central truths ; creation must remain God's work ; the Bible 
must remain God's revelation of Himself; but for a time it is content 
to wait, loyal to fact from whatever side it comes ; confident alike 
in the many-sidedness and in the unity of truth. While he accepts 
and while he searches, the Churchman can enjoy alike the inquiry 
of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it, the knowledge 
of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, 
which is the enjoying of it ; and all these together, says Lord 
Bacon, are the sovereign good of human nature. 2 

Thus far we have in this part considered the Church's function 
with regard to truth from the point of view of those whom it has 
to teach. Its function is no less important from the point of view 
of the truth itself. As spiritual life is a tender plant that needs 
care and training ; so spiritual truth is a precious gem that may 
easily be lost, and therefore needs careful guarding. ' The gem 
requires a casket, the casket a keeper.' Truth is indeed great, and 
will prevail, but not apart from the action of men ; not unless 
there are those who believe in it, take pains about it and propagate 
it. This is the case even with scientific truths ; a fortiori, there- 
fore, with moral and religious truths which affect life and need to 



1 Commonitorium, ix. and xxiii. 

2 Bacon, Essay on Truth. 



326 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

be translated into life before they can be really understood. The 
comparative study of religions is showing us more and more how- 
much of deep spiritual truth there is in heathen religions, but it is 
showing us equally how little power this truth had to hold its own, 
how it was overlaid, crushed out, stifled. The truth of the unity 
of God underlies much of the polytheism of India, Greece, and 
Rome ; but it is only the philosopher and the scholar that can find 
it there. It is only in the Jewish Church, the nation which stood 
alone from other nations as a witness to the truth, that it retained 
its hold as a permanent force. The Fatherhood of God is implied 
in the very names and titles of most of the chief heathen gods ; 
but what a difference in its meaning and force since the time of 
Jesus Christ ! It is not only that He expanded and deepened its 
meaning, so that it implied the fatherhood of all men alike, and a 
communication of a spiritual nature to all ; it is also, and much 
more, that He committed the truth as a sacred deposit to a 
Church, each member of which aimed at showing himself as the 
son of a perfect Father, and which witnessed to the universal 
Fatherhood by the fact of a universal brotherhood. 

The very truths of natural religion, which heathenism tended to 
degrade, found a safe home within the Church ; the knowledge of 
the Creator, His eternal power and Godhead, which the nations 
had known but lost, because they glorified Him not as God, neither 
were thankful, has been kept alive in the Eucharistic services of 
the Church, repeating through the ages its praise of the Creator : 
1 We praise Thee, we bless Thee, we worship Thee, we give thanks 
to Thee, for Thy great glory, O Lord God, heavenly King, God 
the Father Almighty.' 

III. We pass naturally to the third point : the Church is the 
home of worship. It is the Temple of the Lord. As a teaching 
body, it had carried on and spiritualized the work of the Jewish 
Synagogue : it also took up and spiritualized the conceptions of 
prayer and praise and sacrifice which clustered round the Jewish 
Temple. The Body of Christ was to take the place of the Temple 
when the Jews destroyed it. 1 And here, as in all other respects, 
the body is the organ and representative of the risen Lord. He, 
when on earth, had been a priest in the deepest sense of the word ; 
He, as the representative of the Father, had mediated the Father's 
blessings to man ; He, as one with man, had become a merciful and 
faithful high-priest for man ; He had offered his whole life to God 
for the service of man; He had by the offering of His pure will 

1 St. John ii. 19-21. 



ix. The Church, 327 

made purification of sins ; He lives still, a priest forever, pleading, 
interceding for mankind. 

And so the Church, His body, carries on this priestly work on 
earth. ' Sacerdotalism, priestliness, is the prime element of her 
being.' 1 She is the source of blessing to mankind; she pleads 
and intercedes and gives herself for all mankind. Christians, as 
a body, are ' a royal priesthood.' Christ made them ' priests unto 
His God and Father,' they can ' enter into the holy place,' like 
priests, 'with hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and bodies 
washed with pure water.' They are 'the genuine high-priestly 
race of God : ' ' every righteous man ranks as a priest : ' ' to the 
whole Church is a priesthood given.' 2 This priesthood is exercised 
throughout life, as each Christian gives his life to God's service, 
and the whole Church devotes itself for the good of the whole 
world. But it finds its expression in worship, for worship is the 
Godward aspect of life. It expresses, it emphasizes, it helps to 
make permanent, the feelings that mould life. It is the recognition 
that our life comes from God : that it has been redeemed by God • 
it is the quiet joyous resting upon the facts of His love ; it is the 
conscious spiritual offering of our life to God ; it is the adoration 
of His majesty. This worship the Church leads and organizes. 
' In the Church and in Christ Jesus ' is to be given ' the glory to 
God unto all generations for ever and ever.' In the Apocalypse, it 
is pictured as praising God alike for His work in Creation and in 
Redemption. In the Eucharist the Church shows forth the Lord's 
Death till He come. 3 Hence this act of Eucharistic worship, 
above all others, has become the centre of unity. In it the Church 
has offered its best to God : all the more external gifts of art, such 
as architecture, painting, and music, have been consecrated in 
worship j but deeper still, in it each Christian has taken up his 
own life, his body and soul, and offered it as a holy, lively, and 
reasonable sacrifice unto God, a service in spirit and in truth : and 
deeper still, he recognizes that his life does not stand alone ; 
through the common ties of humanity in Christ he is linked on by 
a strange solidarity with all mankind ; his life depends on theirs 
and theirs on his, and so he offers it not for himself only but for 

1 From a striking and bold article by Professor Milligan in the Exposi- 
tor, March, 1889. 

2 1 St. Peter if. 9; Rev. i. 6; Heb. x. 19. Justin Martyr, Dialog, c. 
Tryph., 116; Irenasus, iv. 8; Origen, Horn. vi. in Lev. 5. For other 
instances, cp. Seeberg, ubi supra, or Gore, Church and the Ministry, 
pp. 87-90. 

3 Eph. iii. 21 (R. V.^ ; Rev. iv. 11, v. 11-14; 1 Cor. xi. 26. 



328 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

all ; in the power of Christ he intercedes for all mankind : and 
deeper still, he feels in the presence of the Holiness of God how 
unworthy his own offering and his own prayers are, and he pleads, 
he recalls before the Father, as the source of his own hope and his 
own power of self-sacrifice, the one complete offering made for all 
mankind. 

So the Church performs its universal priesthood ; 1 so it leads a 
worship, bright, joyous, amidst all the trials and perplexities of the 
world, for it tells of suffering vanquished ; simple in its essence, 
so that poor as well as rich can rally round it ; yet deep and pro- 
found in its mysteries, so that the most intellectual cannot fathom 
it. It is a universal priesthood, for it needs the consecration of 
every life : and yet this function too of the Church naturally has 
its organs, whose task it is to make its offerings and to stand before 
it as the types of self-consecration. The Church has from the first 
special persons who perform its liturgy, its public ministering to 
the Lord. 2 It is in connection with worship, and the meetings 
of the Church that St. Paul emphasizes the need of unity and 
subordination, and dwells upon God's special setting of Apostles, 
Prophets, and Teachers in the Church. 3 The Epistle of Clement 
to the Corinthians may be open to difficult questions of interpre- 
tation in its language about the ministry, but this at least is clear, 
that order and subordination are treated as the necessary outcome 
of love, which is of the essence of the Church ; that this order and 
subordination is specially needed in all details of worship ; that it 
had been so in Judaism, and must be so, a fortiori, in the Chris- 
tian Church ; that as Christ came from God, so the Apostles from 
Christ, and their successors from them ; and therefore it must be 
wrong to throw off subordination to those who were so appointed 
and who have blamelessly offered the gifts. 4 ' The Church/ said 
St. Augustine, ' from the time of the Apostles, through most 
undoubted succession of the bishops, perseveres till the present 
moment, and offers to God in the Body of Christ the sacrifice of 
praise.' 5 As the teaching function of the whole Church does not 

1 Cf. the striking account of the true Christian sacrifice in St. Aug., de 
Civ. Dei, x. 6 : ' Profecto efficitur ut tota ipsa redempta civitas, hoc est con- 
gregatio societasque sanctorum universale sacrificium offeratur Deo per 
sacerdotem magnum, qui etiam se ipsum obtulit in passione pro nobis, ut 
tanti capitis corpus essemus. . . . Hoc est sacrificium Christianorum, multi 
unum corpus in Christo. Quod etiam sacramento altaris fidelibus noto 
frequentat ecclesia, ut ei demonstretur, quod in ea re, quam offert, ipsa 
offeratur.' 

3 Acts xiii. 1. 8 1 Cor. xi.-xiv. ; cp. 1 Tim. ii. 

4 Clem., ad Cor. i., esp. 40-45. 5 Contra Adv. Leg. et Proph., xx. 39. 



ix. The Church, 329 

militate against the special order of teachers, so the priestly func- 
tion of the whole does not militate against a special order of 
priests. We cannot speak of those who are ordained as 'going 
into the Church,' — and it is hard to estimate the harm done by 
that fatal phrase, — for that implies that the laity are not of the 
Church, but we can call them priests in a special sense ; for they 
give themselves up in a deeper way to the service of God, — they 
are specially trained and purified for His service ; they are put as 
representatives of the whole Church in a way in which no other is, 
able to know and to sympathize with its wants, its joys, its failings ; 
able therefore to intercede for it with God and to bring His bless- 
ings to it. As the Church stands in relation to the world, so they 
stand to the Church; they fill up that which is lacking of the 
afflictions of Christ in their flesh for His body's sake which is the 
Church, whereof they are made ministers ; they convey spiritual 
gifts and benediction to the Church. 

To complete the conception of the Church, it would be neces- 
sary to add the thought of the Church expectant and triumphant, 
the presence of the blessed dead. For they too strengthen and 
complete each aspect of the Church's work. The great cloud of 
witnesses, the heroes of faith, who watch their brethren on earth, 
they, by their example, aid the spiritual life and strengthen us to 
lay aside every weight and the sin that doth so easily beset us ; 
their virtues reflect parts of the manifold glory of the Son of Man. 
With their heirs noblesse oblige ; each Christian born of such ances- 
try is able to be, like the Athenian Lycurgus, independent of the 
world, bold and outspoken, because of his noble birth. 1 The 
record of their writings strengthens the witness to the faith once 
delivered to the saints, and binds us to loyalty to that which has 
stood the test of ages. They, ' the general assembly and church of 
the firstborn enrolled in heaven,' themselves, we believe, worship 
God with a purer worship than ours ; the thought of their pres- 
ence in worship, as we join with angels and archangels and all 
the company of heaven, lifts our hearts to a wider, more spiritual 
adoration. 

But for our present purpose it is with the Church militant we 
have to deal : the Church on earth, the visible organ of the risen 
Lord, the organ of redemption, of revelation, of worship ; the chief 
instrument designed by the Lord for the establishment of the king- 
dom of Heaven upon earth. That is our ideal of it. But what of 
the reality ? of the historical facts ? Has not the Church crushed 

1 UappyiGiaar^s 5tec t^v evytveiav, Plutarch., Vitas x Orat, 7 



33° The Religion of the hicamation. 

out individual life and freedom ? has it not thrown its shield over 
laxity? has it not repressed zeal, and so driven piety into noncon- 
formity ? has it not tried to check scientific truth and condemned 
a Galileo ? has it not made worship a matter of form and reduced 
it to externalism ? So its opponents ask, and its defenders admit 
that there is much of truth in these charges. They admit that it 
has looked very different from its ideal. ' It has looked like an 
obscure and unpopular sect; it has looked like a wonderful 
human institution vying with the greatest in age and power ; it has 
looked like a great usurpation ; it has looked like an overgrown 
and worn-out system ; it has been obscured by the outward acci- 
dents of splendor or disaster ; it has been enriched, it has been 
plundered ; at one time throned above emperors, at another under 
the heel of the vilest ; it has been dishonored by the crimes of its 
governors, by truckling to the world, by the idolatry of power, by 
greed and selfishness, by their unbelief in their own mission, by 
the deep stain of profligacy, by the deep stain of blood.' l The 
Church has, indeed, many confessions to make, of its failure to be 
true to its ideal. But there are several considerations which must 
be borne in mind when we pass judgment upon it. 

In the first place, it was committed to human hands, ' the treas- 
ure is in earthen vessels ; ' and while it gains thus in reality, in 
human sympathy, in touching the facts of every-day life, it is exposed 
to all the risks of imperfection, mistake, perversion. But further, as 
St. Augustine said, we still can say, ' Non adhuc regnat hoc regnum.' 
The Church has never had free play ; it has never been in a posi- 
tion to carry out its ideal. At first, a persecuted sect, it had not 
the power ; then, when it became established and gained the power, 
there burst into it an influx of half-Christianized converts who low- 
ered its moral level or misunderstood its doctrines ; then with the 
break-up of the Roman Empire, it had to tame and civilize the 
new races of Europe ; and finally, the divisions of the Reformation 
have weakened its witness in the world. But, more important still, 
the very greatness of the ideal has caused the difficulty of its real- 
ization, and has exposed itself to caricature and to one-sidedness. 
The richer, the more many-sided, the more complete an ideal is, 
the less possible is it for any one generation to express it completely, 
the more likely is it that one side of truth will be pressed to the 
exclusion of some, if not of all the rest. 

This may be tested in each of the points which we have consid- 
ered. The Church is an organization for spiritual life, for holiness. 

1 The Dean of St. Paul's, Advent Sermons, p. 73. 



ix. The Church, 331 

It makes the bold claim to be the society of saints ; but at once 
there arises the conflict between the ideal and the actual state of 
men. Press the ideal, and you will narrow the Church to those 
who are externally leading good lives or who are conscious of con- 
version to Christ. This was the line taken by the Novatians, by 
the Donatists, by the Puritans, by the Baptists, and the Church was 
thereby narrowed. On the other hand, dwell only on the actual 
state, the weakness, the failures of human nature, and you acquiesce 
in a low level of morality. The Church aims at being true to both ; 
it will not exclude any from its embrace who are willing to submit 
to its laws j it takes children and trains them ; it takes the imper- 
fect and disciplines them ; it rejects none, save such as rejoice in 
their iniquity and deliberately refuse to submit to discipline. 

But again, this suggests another class of difficulties, all those 
which are associated with the relation of the individual to the soci- 
ety, difficulties which are parallel to the difficulties in politics, which 
are not yet solved there, and which are always needing readjust- 
ment. Here again it is possible to overpress either side ; the 
claims of the society may be urged to the detriment of the individ- 
ual, the central organization may crush out national life and give 
no scope for individual development, and so there arises the impe- 
rial absolutism of the mediaeval Church. On the other hand, it is 
equally possible to exaggerate the claims of individualism, of inde- 
pendence, of freedom, and the result is division and disaster to the 
whole society ; the individual is only anxious to save his own soul, 
and religion is claimed to be only a thing between a man and his 
God ; common Church life becomes impossible, and the witness of 
the Church to the world, and thereby its power for missionary 
work, becomes weakened. As before, the Church ideal strives to 
combine both sides of the truth. It values, it insists on, the rights 
of each individual soul ; its mission is to convey the Spirit to it, that 
is to say, to waken it up to a consciousness of its own individual 
relation to God, its own personal responsibility in God's sight ; it 
does bid each individual save his own soul. But it keeps also 
before him the claims of the society ; it says to him that in saving 
his soul he must lose it in service for others ; when his soul is 
saved, it must be used for active service with others in joint work. 
It does say that the society is more important for the world than 
any one individual member of it, and that each individual gets real 
strength when he speaks and acts not for himself but as represent- 
ing the society behind him. It is possible to think of the Church 
as an organization existing for the spiritual good of the individual ; 
but it is possible also, and it is a deeper view, to think of the indi- 



332 The Religion of the Incarnation, 

vidual as existing for the good of the Church, like a singer training 
himself not to display his own voice, but to strengthen the general 
effect of the whole choir. That is the ideal of the Church, a body 
which quickens the individual into full conscious life, that the indi- 
vidual may devote his life to the service of the whole. Its life is 
like that of a great moving flight of birds, each with its own life, yet 
swaying and rising and turning as by a common impulse, — 

'Their jubilant activity evolves 
Hundreds of curves and circlets, to and fro, 
Upwards and downwards ; progress intricate 
Yet unperplexed, as if one spirit swayed 
Their indefatigable flight.' 1 

The Church, again, is the teacher of truth ; but in the acquisi- 
tion of truth there are always two elements. There are the fixed 
facts of life, with which theory deals, and the accumulation of past 
thought upon the facts ; there is also the creative spirit which plays 
upon these, which re-adapts, combines, discovers. The teacher of 
any science has to convey to his pupil the accumulated theories of 
the past and to quicken in him fresh power of thinking ; he speaks 
first with authority, though of course with assurance that his authority 
is rational, and that the pupil will understand it ultimately. The 
teacher of morality, the parent, teaches even more strongly with 
authority, though he too trusts that the child will ultimately accept 
the law on rational grounds. The pupil needs at once a receptive 
and a critical faculty. The absence or exaggeration of either is 
equally fatal. Here again the Church ideal tries to combine both 
sides and to insist upon the real unity of all truth, and this makes 
its task so difficult. At times the whole stress has been laid on the 
permanent elements in the faith, and the result has been, as often 
in the Oriental Church, a tendency to intellectual stagnation : at 
other times the present speaking voice of the Church has been 
emphasized, and any theory has been hastily adopted as absolutely 
true, without due consideration of its relation to other truths. At 
times authority has been over-emphasized, and the acceptance of 
dogma has seemed to be made the equivalent of a living trust in a 
personal God ; at others the duty of individual search after truth, 
of individual conviction, has been pressed ; the traditions of the 
past have been ignored ; nothing has been of value except that 
which has commended itself to the individual reason, and the result 
has been confusion, uncertainty, the denial of the greatness and the 
mystery and the width of truth, and too often a moral and spiritual 

1 Wordsworth, The Recluse. 



ix. The Church. 333 

paralysis. Meanwhile the Church has tried to hold to both sides : 
it has insisted on the ultimate unity of all knowledge ; starting from 
the axiom that One is our teacher, even Christ, and believing that 
all truth comes from His inspiration as the Word of God, it has 
refused to acquiesce in intellectual contradiction ; it has ever held, 
with King Lear, 'that "ay" and "no " too is no good divinity.' 
The truths of philosophy and religion must be one ; the truths 
of science and religion must be one. 1 In the desire to see this 
the Church has been hasty, it has rejected scientific truth be- 
cause it did not fall in with its interpretation of the Bible. It 
has made its mistakes, but it has done so out of a noble princi- 
ple. It would be easy to gain consistency by sacrificing either 
side ; it is hard to combine the two : and this is what the Church 
has tried to do ; it has upheld the belief of the ultimate synthesis 
of all knowledge. In exactly the same way, the sects have often 
gained force, popularity, effectiveness for the moment by the em- 
phasis laid on some one truth ; the Church has gained strength, 
solidity, permanence, by its witness to the whole body of truth. 

The same tendency may be shortly illustrated with regard to the 
function of worship. That too is a complex act ; in that there 
should be the free conscious act of the individual, worshipping in 
spirit and in truth a God whom he knows as a personal God ; but 
clearly this is not all ; the whole society must express its corporate 
life in corporate worship. Its influence is something over and 
above the influence of its individual members, and that influence 
must be exercised on the side of God ; it must be recognized as 
coming from God ; it must be solemnly consecrated to God's ser- 
vice. The society has a right then to call upon its individual 
members to join in this corporate action. On the one hand lies 
the danger of the overpressure of the society, where the service of 
the individual is unwilling or apathetic : on the other hand the 
danger of individualism and sectarianism, in which the whole con- 
ception of public worship is lowered and the individual is never 
trained in religious matters to feel the kindling power of a common 
enthusiasm, to be lifted above himself in the wave of a common 
joy. The Church has aimed at combining both ; by the insistence 
on confession and absolution it has tried to train the individual to 
a sense of personal penitence and personal gratitude : but these 
have only prepared him to share in the common worship of the 
society. 

1 Cp. Socrates, iii. 16 : Tb yap KaXbv, ivQa av if, 1hiov ttjs a\r)8etas effrlv. St. 
Aug., de doctr. Ch., ii. 18 : ' Quisquis bonus verusque Christianus est, Do- 
mini sui esse intellegat ubique invenerit veritatem.' 



334 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

But the Church has had to do even more than this. Not only 
has it aimed at keeping in due proportion the conflicting elements 
in life, in truth, and in worship ; it has also had to keep alive 
the three sides at once, and to keep them in their true relation 
to each other. To be at one and the same time the home of life 
and truth and worship, this belongs to its ideal, and this adds 
new difficulties. Sometimes one element has preponderated, 
sometimes another : but its aim is always to preserve the three. 
It has historically preserved the synthesis of the three more than 
any other Christian body. It has moved through the ages doing 
its work, however imperfectly. It has kept historic continuity with 
the past : it has disciplined life and raised the standard of morality 
and united the nations of the world. It has been a witness to a 
spiritual world, to the fact that men have interests above material 
things, and that these deeper spiritual interests can combine them 
with the strongest links. It has gone out as a Catholic Church, 
knowing that it contains in its message truths that can win their 
way to every nation ; and therefore it has never ceased to be a 
Missionary Church, as it needs that each nation should draw out 
into prominence some aspect of its truth, and reveal in life some 
side of its virtue. It has enshrined, protected, witnessed to the 
truth ; both as an ' authoritative republication of natural religion,' 
keeping alive the knowledge of God, and of His moral government 
of the world, 1 and as a revelation of redemption. It has drawn up 
the canon of Holy Scripture and formulated its Creeds : it still 
witnesses to the unity of knowledge : it has held up before the 
world an ideal of worship, at once social and individual. Its truths 
have indeed spread beyond itself, so that men find them now in 
bodies opposed to it ; and therefore are perplexed and do not 
know where their allegiance is really due. It has indeed been it- 
self often untrue to its mission ; but ever and again it has reas- 
serted itself with a strange recuperative power, for, as the fountain 
of its life, there is ever the power of the Holy Spirit, sent by the 
risen Lord ; to check temporary failures or accretions of teachings, 
there has been the perpetual re-appeal to Holy Scripture and the 
Creeds ; to control idiosyncrasies of worship, there has been the 
permanent element of its Liturgies. Its very failures have come 
from its inherent greatness ; they are the proof of great capacities, 
the omen of a greater future, Like St. Paul, it holds on its way 
1 by glory and dishonor, by evil report and good report, as deceiv- 
ing, and yet true, as unknown, and yet well known ; as dying, and 

1 Butler's Analogy, pt. ii. ch. I. 



ix. The Chitrch. 335 

behold it lives ; as chastened, and not killed ; as sorrowful, yet 
always rejoicing ; as poor, and yet making many rich ; as having 
nothing, and yet possessing all things.' 

Does the world need the witness of the Church's life less now 
than in past ages? Less? Nay, for many reasons more. The 
widening opportunities of intercourse are opening up new nations, 
whose existence had only been suspected before ; they are bring- 
ing the various parts of human kind into a closer touch with each 
other. The problems of civilization are more complex ; and the 
more complicated a piece of machinery is, the more difficult it is 
to keep it in order ; so small a defect may throw the whole out of 
gear. The wider our knowledge of humanity, the greater need 
of a Catholic Church, which shall raise its voice above the din of 
conquest and the bustle of commerce, and insist that all races shall 
be treated with justice and tenderness, as made of one blood; 
which shall welcome all men freely into its own brotherhood, and 
conveying to them the gifts of the Spirit, shall help them to show 
forth in their lives fresh beauties of the richly variegated wisdom of 
God. The growth of our huge towns, ' where numbers overwhelm 
humanity,' and the accumulation of wealth bring the danger nearer 
home : amidst social upheavings and the striving of class with 
class, there is need of a Church to rise above rich and poor alike, 
which shall embrace both ; which shall teach both a real visible 
brotherhood amid all external inequalities ; which shall teach the 
poor the dignity of labor wrought for the good of the whole society, 
and teach the rich the duty and the blessing of the consecration of 
their wealth. With the wider use of machinery and the restless 
rush of money-getting, it is important that there should be the 
appeal of the Church that no man or woman shall be degraded 
into being a mere machine ; because each is a living soul, capable 
of personal responsibility, capable of a pure life, capable of a knowl- 
edge of God. 

Amid the increasing specialization of studies, amid all the new 
discoveries of science and historical criticism, with all the perplexi- 
ties that arise as to the interpretation and inspiration of the Bible 
now, if ever, there is need of a Church, which, conscious of its own 
spiritual life, knowing that its spiritual truths have stood the test of 
centuries, has patience and courage to face all these new facts and 
see their bearing and take their measure ; which all the while shall 
go on teaching to its children with an absolutebnt rational author- 
ity the central facts of the spiritual life, and shall never doubt the 
ultimate unity of all truth. 

Amid the uncertainties of individualism, the fantastic services of 



336 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

those who tend to reduce worship to a mere matter of emotion, 
amid the sorrows and perplexities of modern life, the world needs 
the witness of a rational and corporate worship, which recognizes 
the deepest sufferings of human nature enshrined in its very heart, 
yet recognizes also the way in which suffering when accepted 
freely is blessed of God ; which worships at once a crucified and 
a risen Lord. Over against the divisions of race and continent 
the Church raises still its witness to the possibility of a universal 
brotherhood ; over against despair and dispersion it speaks of faith 
and the unity of knowledge ; over against pessimism it lifts up a 
perpetual Eucharist. 



X. 

SACRAMENTS. 



FRANCIS 



PAGET. 



22 



X. 

SACRAMENTS. 

It is the characteristic distinction of some men's work that they 
are resolute to take into just account all the elements and con- 
ditions of the matter with which they deal. They will not pur- 
chase simplicity at the expense of facts ; they will not, by any act 
of arbitrary exclusion or unreal abstraction, give up even the most 
distant hope of some real attainment for the sake of securing a 
present appearance of completeness. They recognize and insist 
upon all the complexity of that at which they look ; they may see 
many traits in it to which they can assign no definite place or 
meaning, but they will not ignore or disparage these ; they will 
not forget them, even though for a while they may have to defer 
the closer study of them ; they will dutifully bear them in mind, 
and carry them along through all their work ; they will let them 
tell with full weight in qualifying, deferring, or precluding the 
formation of any theory about that of which these traits, trivial or 
important, explained or unexplained, are a genuine part. It is 
difficult to find a name for this rare and distinctive excellence. 
But it is that which more than any other quality gives per- 
manence and fruitfulness to work : for even the fragmentary 
and loosely ordered outcome of such thought is wont to prove 
germinant and quickening as time goes on. Patience, honesty, 
reverence, and unselfishness, are virtues which appear conge- 
nial with such a character of mind ; and the high, undaunted 
faith which is the secret of its strength and the assurance of 
its great reward has been told by Mr. Browning in ' A Gramma- 
rian's Funeral : ' — 



340 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

* Was it not great ? did not he throw on God 

(He loves the burthen) — 
God's task to make the heavenly period 
Perfect the earthen ? ' x 

It will be the chief aim of this essay to show that in the embodi- 
ment and presentation of Christianity by the Church of Christ 
there may be seen an excellence analogous, at least, to this dis- 
tinctive characteristic of the work that all approve as best and 
truest upon earth; that in contrast with many religious systems, 
attaining a high degree of moral beauty and spiritual fervor, the 
historic Church meets human life in full front; that it has been 
taught and enabled, in its ministry of Sacraments, to deal with the 
entirety of man's nature, not slighting, or excluding, or despairing 
of any true part of his being. But it is necessary at the outset to 
define, in general and provisional terms, the nature and the prin- 
ciple of that element in the Church's faith and life which is here 
under consideration, and in which especially this amplitude and 
catholicity of dealing with human nature is to be sought. By the 
Sacramental system, then, is meant the regular use of sensible 
objects, agents, and acts as being the means or instruments of 
Divine energies, ' the vehicles of saving and sanctifying power.' 2 
The underlying belief, the basal and characteristic principle of this 
system, may be thus stated. As the inmost being of man rises to 
the realization of its true life, to the knowledge and apprehension 
of God and of itself, in the act of faith, and as He whose Spirit 
quickened it for that act, greets its venture with fresh gifts of light 
and strength, it is His will that these gifts should be conveyed by 
means or organs taken from this world, and addressed to human 
senses. His Holy Spirit bears into the faithful soul the communi- 

1 In ' Rabbi Ben Ezra ' the true measure of such work's beneficence is 
shown : — 

' Not on the vulgar mass 

Called " work," must sentence pass, 
Things done, that took the eye and had the price ; 

O'er which, from level stand, 

The low world laid its hand, 
Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice : 

'But all the world's coarse thumb 

And finger failed to plumb, 
So passed in making up the main account ; 

All instincts immature, 

All purposes unsure, 
That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's amount/ 

2 Cf. A. Knox, Remains, ii. 138. 



x. Sacraments. 341 

cation of its risen Lord's renewing manhood ; and for the convey- 
ance of that unseen gift He takes things and acts that can be seen, 
and words that can be heard ; His way is viewless as the wind ; 
but He comes and works by means of which the senses are aware ; 
and His hidden energy accepts a visible order and outward imple- 
ments for the achievement of its purpose. 

The limits of this essay preclude the discussion of the larger 
questions which beset the terms of these definitions. Previous 
essays have dealt with those truths which are necessarily involved 
in any declaration of belief about the Christian Sacraments. The 
Being of God, the Incarnation of the Eternal Word, the Atone- 
ment, the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, the Person and 
Mission of the Holy Ghost, these are indeed implied in the 
Sacramental system of the Church, not simply as component and 
essential parts of the same building, nor as mere logical data, but 
rather as the activities of the bodily life are presupposed in the 
exertion of the body's strength. But these cannot here be spoken 
of; it is from preceding pages of this book that thoughts and con- 
victions must be gathered, without which much that is here said 
will seem either unsubstantial, or merely technical. It must be 
owned that the severance of any subject from its context entails 
not only incompleteness, but also a certain disproportion and 
obscurity in its treatment ; since the lines of thought which run 
out into the context are lines down which light comes, light that is 
lost if they are closed. Indeed anything like a full presentation 
or a formal defence of a detached part of Christian teaching and 
practice seems intrinsically very difficult, and within the limits of 
an essay impossible. There are, however, two questions which 
must be asked concerning each several part of the whole structure, 
and in regard to which something may here be said. The first is : 
Does this part match with its surroundings in Christianity ; is it a 
harmonious and congenial element in the whole order, in the great 
body of doctrine to which it claims to belong ? The second is : 
Does it match with the surroundings on which it claims to act, with 
its environment in human life ; is it apt for the purpose to which 
it is addressed and the conditions among which it comes ? It is 
here proposed, as has been said, to consider in regard to the Sacra- 
mental system the second especially of these two questions ; but its 
consideration will involve some thoughts which may perhaps be a 
sufficient answer to the first. And thus something may also be 
gained beyond the range of the present inquiry ; for it seems fair 
to hold that any part of Christian teaching in regard to which both 
these questions can be answered in the affirmative, has a strong 



342 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

tendency at all events to commend the claim of the whole scheme 
with which it is inwoven and essentially continuous. For the per- 
fection of inner coherence in a structure whose main lines, at least, 
were projected in the world under circumstances which preclude 
the thought of scientific or artificial elaboration, and the perfection 
of adaptation, not to the wishes and tastes of men, nor to the 
arrangements of society, but to the deepest, fullest, surest truth of 
humanity ; these are characteristics which we should expect to 
find in a revelation from God to man, and be surprised to find 
elsewhere. 

I. Probably there come to most men who have got beyond the 
happy confidence of youth, and the unhappy confidence of self- 
satisfaction, times at which they seem to themselves to be living in 
a somewhat perplexed and dimly lighted world, with tasks for which 
their strength is insufficient, among problems which they cannot 
solve. And Christianity is held out to them, or has been received 
by them, as a way of life under these circumstances, as a method 
and a means of living rightly ; a system which does not indeed 
take all the perplexity out of the world, or all the difficulties out 
of their course, but which will give them light and strength enough 
to keep in the right track, to use their time well, to take their 
proper place, and do their proper work, and so to move towards 
the realization of all the many parts and possibilities of their nature ; 
a goal which may seem to grow both larger and more distant the 
more one thinks about it. Christianity professes to be that Divine 
word, which was faintly surmised of old, 1 and in due time was sent 
forth to bear men wisely and surely through this world. Plainly 
one of the first and fairest questions which may be asked in regard 
to it is, whether it shows a perfect understanding of the nature 
with which it claims to deal, and the life which it claims to guide. 

Now when we set ourselves to think what we are for whom a 
possible and satisfactory way of life is sought, what that nature is, 
whose right principles and conditions of development are to be 
determined, one of the first things which we discern is an appar- 
ently invincible complexity. The life we have to order is a two- 
fold life, it moves through a twofold course of experience ; the 
facts, the activities in which we are conscious of it, are of two 
kinds ; and men ordinarily distinguish them as bodily and spiritual. 
Some such distinction is recognized and understood by the 
simplest of us ; it is embedded beyond possibility of expulsion in 
all language ; stubbornly and successfully it resists all efforts to 

1 Cf. Plato, Phajdo, 5$, C, D. 






x. Sacraments. 343 

abolish it. We know for ourselves that either of the two groups 
of facts may stand out in clearer light, in keener consciousness, at 
certain times ; we may even for a while, a little while, lose sight 
of either of them and seem to be wholly occupied with the other ; 
but presently the neglected facts will re-assert their rights ; neither 
the one group nor the other may long be set aside without 
risk of the Nemesis which avenges slighted truths, — the Neme- 
sis of disproportion and disease. We may confuse our sense of 
the distinction; we may shift or blur or bend whatever line 
had seemed to mark it; we may insist on the qualifying phe- 
nomena which forbid us to think of any barrier as impenetrable ; 
but we cannot so exalt or push forward either realm as utterly 
to extrude, absorb, or annihilate the other ; we cannot, with con- 
sistency or sanity, live as though our life were merely spiritual 
or merely bodily. It is as impossible steadily to regard the spirit 
as a mere function or product of the body as it is to treat the 
body with entire indifference, as a casually adjacent fragment of 
the external world. But further, as the distinction of the two 
elements in our being seems insuperable, so does their union seem 
essential to the integrity of our life. Any abstraction of one 
element, as though it could detach itself from the other and live 
on its own resources, is felt to be unreal and destructive of our 
proper nature. So it has been finely said, ' Materialism itself has 
here done valuable sendee in correcting the exaggeration of a one- 
sided spiritualism. It is common, but erroneous to speak of man's 
body as being related to his spirit only as is the casket to the jewel 
which it contains. But, as a matter of fact, the personal spirit of 
man strikes its roots far and deep into the encompassing frame of 
sense, with which from the first moment of its existence, it has 
been so intimately associated. . . . The spirit can indeed exist 
independently of the body, but this independent existence is not 
its emancipation from a prison-house of matter and sense ; it is 
a temporary and abnormal divorce from the companion whose 
presence is needed to complete its life.' x If we try to imagine 
our life in abstraction from the body we can only think of it as 
incomplete and isolated ; as impoverished, deficient, and expectant. 
And certainly in our present state, in the interval between what we 
call birth and death, the severance of the two elements is incon- 
ceivable ; they are knit together in incessant and indissoluble com- 

1 H. P. Liddon, Some Elements of Religion, pp. 116, 117. Cf. the won- 
derful venture towards a conception of the disembodied soul and of its 
manner of life, in the Dream of Gerontius ; and also in Battle and After, 
by R. St. John Tyrwhitt, p. 7. 



544 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

munion. In no activity, no experience of either, can the other 
be utterly discarded ; ' for each action and reaction passing between 
them is a fibre of that which forms their mutual bond.' 1 Even 
into those energies of which men speak as purely spiritual, the 
bodily life will find its way, will send its help or hindrance ; sick- 
ness, hunger, weariness, and desire : these are but some of its mes- 
sengers to the spirit, messengers who will not always be denied. 
And in every conscious action of the bodily life the presence of 
the spirit is to be discerned. The merely animal fulfilment of 
merely animal demands, devoid of moral quality, is only possible 
within that dark tract of instinct which lies below the range of our 
consciousness. When once desire is consciously directed to its 
object (wherever the desire has originated and whatever be the 
nature of the object), a moral quality appears, a moral issue is 
determined ; and the act of the body becomes an event in the life 
of the spirit. 2 The blind life of brute creatures is as far out of our 
reach as is the pure energy of angels ; we can never let the body 
simply go its own way; for in the essential complexity of our 
being, another sense is ever waiting upon the conscious exercise 
of those five senses that we share with lower animals, — the sense 
of duty and of sin. 

Thus complex are we, — we who crave more light and strength, 
who want to find the conditions of our health and growth, who lift 
up our eyes unto the hills from whence cometh our help. It would 
be interesting to consider from how many different points of view 
the complexity has been recognized, resented, slandered, or ignored ; 
and how steadily it has held its own. It may need some exercise 
of faith (that is to say, of reasonable patience amidst half-lights 
and fragments) to keep the truth before one, and to allow it its just 
bearing upon thought and conduct, without exaggeration, or self- 
deception, or one-sidedness ; but there is neither health of body 
nor peace of mind in trifling with it. 

. To us, then, being thus complex, Christianity presents a plan, a 
principle, a rule of life. And that primary and inevitable question 
which has been already indicated may therefore take this definite 
form : — Does the scheme proposed to us acknowledge this our 
complexity ? does it provide for us in the entirety of our nature, 
with all that we feel to be essential to our completeness ? or must a 
part of our being be huddled out of sight as we enter the precinct 
of the Church ? 

II. (i) Certainly the whole history and character of the Chris- 

1 Lotze, Microcosmus, Bk. III. c. i. § 2. 

2 Cf. T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, Bk. II. ch. ii. §§ 125, 126. 



x. Sacraments, 345 

tian Revelation would encourage us to hope that its bearing upon 
life would be as broad as the whole of human nature ; and that no 
true part of our being would be excluded from its light, refused its 
welcome, or driven from its feast. When we consider how Chris- 
tianity carae into the world, it would seem strange and disappoint- 
ing if its hold on human life were partial and not inclusive ; if, for 
instance, the body found no place prepared, no help or hope pro- 
vided for it. This was excellently said by Alexander Knox : ' The 
gospel commenced in an accommodation to man's animal exigen- 
cies which was as admirable as it was gracious ; and which the 
hosts of heaven contemplated with delight and wonder. The 
Incarnation of the co-eternal Son, through which St. John was ena- 
bled to declare what he and his fellow Apostles "had seen with 
their eyes, what they had looked upon, and their hands had han- 
dled, of the Word of Life," was in the first instance, so to consult 
human nature in its animal and sensitive capacity, as to give the 
strongest pledge that a dispensation thus introduced would, in 
every subordinate provision, manifest the same spirit and operate 
on the same principle. For could it be thought that the first won- 
derful accommodation of Godhead to the sensitive apprehensions 
of man should be wholly temporary ? and that though that mystery 
of godliness was ever to be regarded as the vital source of 
all spiritual benefits and blessings, no continuance of this wise 
and gracious condescension should be manifested in the means, 
whereby its results were to be perpetuated, and made effectual ? ' x 
It would be possible to follow this mode of thought to a remoter 
point, and to mark in the revealed relation of the Eternal Word to 
the whole creation a sure ground for believing that whensoever, in 
the fulness of time, God should be pleased to bring the world, 
through its highest type, into union with Himself, the access to 
that union would be as wide as the fulness of the nature in which 
He made man at the beginning : that the attractive and uplifting 
bands of love would hold and draw to Him every true element of 
that nature. But it is enough for our present purpose to look 
steadily at the Advent and the Life of Christ : to see how carefully 
and tenderly every fragment of the form He takes is disentangled 
from the deforming evil which He could not take : how perfect are 
the lineaments of the humanity He wears, how freely and clearly 
all that is characteristic of our nature is displayed in His most holy 
life ; where l the hiding of His power,' the restraining of the beams 

1 A. Knox, Remains, ii. 228, 229. The writer of this essay desires to 
acknowledge with gratitude the help he has found in the ' remarkable 
treatise here referred to. 



346 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

of Deity 1 leaves room for the disclosure in Him of whatever 
weakness and limitation properly belongs to us. Surely it would 
be strange if the grace and truth which came among us thus, 
proved partial or restricted in their later dealing with our manhood : 
if any tract of our life were unvisited by their light and blessing : 
if anything which He took were slighted in His kingdom, forgotten 
in His ministry, precluded from His worship. The Incarnation 
was indeed in itself a great earnest of the recognition which would 
be accorded in the Christian life to the whole of our complex 
nature. But there are, more particularly, two points in the coming 
and work of our Lord which seem peculiarly intended to foreshow 
some abiding elevation of the material and visible to share the 
honor of the spiritual element in our life. They are so familiar to 
us that it may not be easy to do full justice to their significance. 

(2) For it does seem deeply significant that when the Word 
was made flesh and dwelt among us, He took up the lines of a 
history replete with forecasts of the consecration of material 
things : He met the truest aspirations of a people trained to unhes- 
itating exultation in a visible worship, encouraged by manifold 
experience to look for the blessings of Divine goodness through 
sensible means, accustomed and commanded to seek for God's 
especial presence in an appointed place and amidst sights on which 
their eyes would rest with thankful confidence. That Church and 
nation ' of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came,' must have 
seemed indeed irrevocably and essentially committed to the prin- 
ciple that when man is brought near to God it is with the entirety 
of his manhood : that God is to be glorified alike in the body and 
in the spirit : and that His mercy really is over all His works. 
Doubtless barriers were to be broken down, when the time of 
prophecy and training passed on into the freedom of realization : 
limitations were to be taken away, distinctions abrogated by Him 
in Whom is neither Jew nor Greek, neither bond nor free, neither 
male nor female .: but religion would surely have grown in reality nar- 
rower and not wider, if the body had been dismissed from its duty 
and gladness in the light of God's countenance, if the spirit alone had 
been bidden to draw near, to worship, to taste and see how gracious 
the Lord is. Through all the amplitude of the Christian dispensation, 
there would have been a sense of loss, of impoverishment, of 
expectation encouraged and unsatisfied, had this been so ; for in 
the preparatory system of Judaism, whatever had been lacking, 
still the whole nature of man had felt the Hand of God and heard 



1 Cf. Hooker, V. liv. 6. 






x. Sacraments, 347 

His Voice. It would have seemed strange if with the wider 
extension of God's light to all the world there had been a narrow- 
ing of its range in the life of each several man. 1 

(3) And then, again, it is to be marked that our Lord Himself 
by repeated acts sustained and emphasized this acceptance of the 
visible as the organ or vehicle of the Divine. His blessing was 
given by the visible laying on of hands, and His miracles were 
wrought not by the bare silent energy of His Almighty will, not 
even in many cases by the mere utterance of His word, but 
through the employment of acts or objects, impressive to the bod- 
ily element in man, and declaring the consecration of the material 
for the work of God. Alike in the blessings bestowed and in the 
manner of their bestowal men must have felt that there was with 
Him no disparagement of the body, no forgetfulness of its need, 
no lack of care for its welfare, its honor, or its hope. Perhaps it 
may even be that had we watched the scene in the Galilean town 
as the sun was setting, and in the cool of the evening they that 
had any sick with divers diseases brought them unto Him ; as He 
moved about among those wasted, suffering forms, and on one 
after another laid His hands and healed them ; it may even be 
that what would have struck us first of all would have been the 
bringing in of a better hope for the bodily life of man and the 
replenishing of a familiar act, a common gesture, with a grace and 
power that it had but vaguely hinted at before. 

We have, then, (1) in the Incarnation of the Son of God, (2) in 
the essential character of the history ordered as an especial prep- 
aration for His coming, and (3) in certain conspicuous features of 
His ministry on earth, a strong encouragement to expect that in 
the life thus brought into the world, in the way thus opened out, 
there would be evinced a large-hearted care for the whole nature 
of men ; that no unreal abstraction would be demanded, and no 
part of humanity be disinherited ; that in the choice of its means, 
in the scope of its beneficence, and in the delineation of its aim, 
Christianity would deal with us as we are, and prove that God has 
not made us thus for nought. An endeavor will be made to show 
how this great hope is greeted in the Sacramental system, and up- 
lifted and led on towards the end of all true hope. But it seems 
necessary first to adduce the grounds for saying that that system 
has been from the beginning an integral part of Christianity. 

III. When we turn to look at the presentation of the Sacra- 
mental principle in the Gospels, our first impression may be that 

1 Cf. A. Knox, ii. 210. 



348 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

the place it holds there is less than that which is given to it in the 
teaching and practice of the Church ; that it is by a dispropor- 
tionate growth that the doctrine of Sacraments has gained so much 
space and so great prominence in Catholic theology. But the 
impression certainly ought not to be lasting. For it is due to our 
forgetfulness of the conditions under which Christianity came into 
the world ; the characteristics and habits of religious thought with 
which it had to deal. We can draw no reasonable inference from 
the brevity or length with which a truth is enunciated in the 
Gospels until we have inquired what were the previous convictions 
of those to whom our Lord spoke ; what preparation had in that 
particular regard been made for His teaching. We ought to look 
for some difference in the manner of revelation corresponding to 
the difference of need when a wholly new principle of thought has 
to be borne into unready minds, and when a fresh direction has to 
be given to an expectation already alert and confident, a new light 
to be thrown on the true worth and meaning of an existing belief 
about God's ways towards men. Amplitude and iteration would 
indeed have been necessary for any teaching which was to dislodge 
the Sacramental principle out of the minds of those among whom 
our Lord came, — to preclude them from seeking the mercy of God 
through visible means. But if the Divine purpose was not to 
destroy but to fulfil ; not to discredit as mere misapprehensions 
the convictions men had received, but to raise and purify them 
by disclosing the response which God had prepared for them ; to 
disengage them from that which had been partial, preparatory, 
transient, and to fasten them on their true satisfaction : then we 
might reverently expect that the method of this teaching would 
probably be such as in the New Testament is shown to us in 
regard to the doctrine of Sacraments. 

(i) For, in the first place, we find abundant and pervading 
signs that the general principle is taken up into Christianity and 
carried on as a characteristic note of its plan and work. The reg- 
ular communication of its prerogative and characteristic gift through 
outward means ; the embodiment of grace in ordinances; the 
designation of visible agents, acts, and substances to be the 
instruments and vehicles of Divine virtue ; — this principle is so 
intimately and essentially woven into the texture of Christianity that 
it cannot be got out without destroying the whole fabric. As our 
Saviour gradually sets forth the outlines of -His design for the 
redemption of the world, at point after point the Sacramental prin- 
ciple is affirmed, and material instruments are designated for the 
achievement of His work. ' He proclaims Himself the Founder of 



i 



x. Sacraments. 349 

a world-wide and imperishable Society/ ' the kingdom of Heaven ' 
or ' the kingdom of God ; ' * and while the claims and energies of 
this kingdom penetrate the hidden depths of life, so that it is indeed 
* a moral empire,' and ' a realm of souls/ yet none the less is it 
openly to take its place in human history. It is not an unsub- 
stantial haze of vague spirituality, precarious and indistinct, hover- 
ing, or said to hover half way between earth and sky, with no 
precise attachment to either. At once, it is the kingdom of 
Heaven, and it is to have all the apparel of a visible society ; it 
touches this earth with a definite and inclusive hold ; it ennobles 
material conditions by a frank acceptance. As in the Incarnation 
so also in the preparation of the Church to be the ever-present 
witness to Christ, the guardian of His truth, and the home of His 
people, the principle was sustained that, in the redemption of the 
world, God would be pleased to take the instruments of His work 
out of that world which He was renewing ; that the quickening 
Spirit would not repel or destroy the material order, but would 
assume, pervade, and use it. 

(2) And, in the second place, the particular expressions of the 
general principle thus reaffirmed were authoritatively appointed ; 
the approved anticipation of men was left in no uncertainty as to 
its response and sanction ; men were told plainly what were the 
outward and visible signs which God had chosen in this world to 
be the means whereby His inward and spiritual grace should be 
received. It is difficult indeed to imagine any way in which more 
weight and incisiveness could have been given to the appointment 
of the two great Sacraments than in the way which Christ was 
pleased to use, — any way in which Baptism and the Eucharist 
could have been more firmly and impressively designated as the 
vital and distinctive acts of the Christian Church. We can hardly 
wonder at their pre-eminence in Christian thought and life when 
we remember how they were fastened upon the consciousness of 
the Church. Their antecedents lay in that long mysterious course 
of history which Almighty God had led on through the strange 
discipline of the changeful centuries to the coming of Christ. And 
then, there had been in Christ's teaching certain utterances which 
seemed to have a peculiar character ; which were plainly of essen- 
tial importance, concerning things necessary for all His disciples, 
bearing on the primary conditions of their life ; and yet utterances 
which were left unexplained, however men might be troubled, 
offended, overstrained, discouraged by them ; left as though their 

1 H. P. Liddon, Bampton Lectures, pp. 101-105. 



350 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

explanation was impossible, until the occurrence of events which 
could not be forestalled. 1 But such utterances, if they could not 
be understood, could still less be forgotten ; they lived in the 
memory, they haunted the imagination, they sustained expectancy ; 
they were as a prophetic conviction in the mind, strong, deep, frag- 
mentary, and unsatisfied. Who can measure the consilient force 
with which, in moments of intensest thought and feeling, moments 
when all the besetting conditions seemed quick with some immi- 
nent disclosure, the Divine commands, meeting, illuminating, estab- 
lishing those former utterances, would be riveted upon the hearts 
of men and clenched forever into the faith and practice of the 
Church, with a dominance never to be forgotten or infringed, as a 
very primal law of life? In the unique, controlling awe of His 
impending agony and crucifixion ; in the heralded majesty of His 
appearance to the disciples upon the mountain where He had 
appointed them, and with the proclamation of the absolute author- 
ity given to Him in heaven and in earth : so did our Lord enact 
the ordinances to which His earlier words had pointed, and in 
which at length their meaning was made clear ; so did He institute 
His two great Sacraments ; so did He disentangle the Sacramental 
principle from all that had been temporary, accidental, disciplinary, 
accommodated, in its past embodiment, and determine what should 
be the form of its two main expressions, for all ages and for all 
men in His Church ' until His coming again,' ' even unto the end 
of the world.' 

It may be in place here briefly to suggest a few thoughts with 
regard to that which was secured by this authoritative designation 
of the outward sign in each great Sacrament, beyond all that could 
have been attained by the general enunciation of the Sacramental 
principle. 

Much might be said — and much more, doubtless, be still left 
unsaid — about the especial fitness of the very elements thus 
chosen from the material world to be the vehicles of saving 
grace, — for the water and the bread and wine are called to their 
place in the Divine work with deep and far-reaching associations 
already belonging to them. Again, the very simplicity and com- 
monness of the elements taken into God's nearest service may have 
been a part of the reason why they were appointed ; for in no other 
way could the minds of men have been more surely and perma- 
nently hindered from many of the mistakes to which in the past 
they had been prone ; in no other way could the Sacramental 

1 Cf. St John iii. 3-13 ; vi. 51-67. 



x. Sacraments. 351 

principle have been more perfectly disengaged from the misconcep- 
tions which had confused its purity ; in no other way could men 
have been more plainly taught that in no expense of this world's 
goods, in no labor of their own hands, in no virtue of the material 
elements, but only in the sustained energy of His will, who took 
and penetrated and employed them, lay the efficacy of the Sacra- 
ment. The very plainness of the element hallowed in the Sacra- 
ment was to urge up men's thoughts from it to Him. But, above 
all, the decisive appointment of particular signs and acts may seem 
to have been necessary in order that the Sacraments might take 
their places as acts emanating from, upheld by, and characteristic 
of the Church's corporate life, and not merely concerned with the 
spiritual welfare of the individual. So St. Paul appeals to Baptism 
and to the Eucharist as both effecting and involving the commu- 
nion of saints. 1 By Sacraments men are to be taken out of the 
narrowness and isolation of their own lives, out of all engrossing 
preoccupation with their own state, into the ample air, the gener- 
ous gladness, the unselfish hope of the City of God ; they are to 
escape from all daily pettiness, all morbid self-interest, all prepos- 
terous conviction of their own importance, into a fellowship which 
spans all ages and all lands. By Baptism and the Eucharist the 
communion of saints is extended and sustained ; they are the dis- 
tinctive acts of the Body of Christ ; and as such He designated 
their essential form, to abide unaltered through all that changed 
around them. And even those who stand aloof from them and 
from the faith on which they rest, may feel the unmatched great- 
ness of an act that has held its place in human life through all the 
revolutions of more than eighteen hundred years, — an act that in 
its essential characteristics is to-day what it was when Imperial Rome 
was venerated as eternal ; an act that is every day renewed, with 
some measure, at least, of the same faith and hope and love, in 
every land where Christ is owned. 

(3) Tne Sacramental principle had been most plainly adopted by 
our Lord ; the spiritual forces with which He would renew the face 
of the earth were to be exerted through material instruments ; and 
He Himself had secured the principle from uncertainty or vague- 
ness or individualism in its expression by appointing, with the ut- 
most weight and penetration of His authority, the definite form of 
two great ordinances, which were to begin and to advance the super- 
natural life of His members, to extend the range of His Church, 
and to maintain its unity. In the acts and letters of His Apostles 

1 1 Cor. x. 17 ; Gal. iii. 27, 28; Eph. iv. 5. 



352 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

we see how His teaching and bidding had been understood ; how 
promptly and decisively His Church declared its life, its work, its 
mission, to be Sacramental. The meaning and emphasis of His 
commandment appear in the obedience of those to whom it was 
given ; in the first words of authoritative counsel uttered by an 
Apostle ; in the first act of the Spirit-bearing Body ; and thence- 
forward in the characteristic habits of the Christian life. 1 

From the first the prominence of Sacraments and Sacramental 
rites is constant. In the teaching of later ages their prominence 
may have been relatively greater, in contrast with the poverty of 
faith and life in those who insisted on their power while they forgot 
their meaning ; but absolutely it would be hard to devise a higher 
place for them than that which they hold in St. Paul's Epistles. 
To be living a life received, nourished and characterized by Bap- 
tism and by the Eucharist, — this is the distinctive note of a Chris- 
tian; thus does he differ from other men. The Sacrament by 
which he became a member of Christ's body must determine 
throughout the two distinctive qualities of his inner life : its sever- 
ance from all forms of worldliness, all dependence on natural 
advantages or natural strength, all confidence in the satisfaction of 
external rules ; and its unfailing newness, as issuing from Him Who 
being raised from the dead, dieth no more, and as carrying through 
all its activities the air and light of heaven. 2 And the Sacrament 
which continually renews in him the presence of his Lord, meeting 
with unstinted wealth the demands of work and growth, assuring 
and advancing the dominance of the new manhood in him : this in 
like manner must determine the sustained simplicity of his bearing 
towards those who with him are members of the one Body, quick- 
ened and informed by the one Life. 3 That men may receive eternal 
life through Jesus Christ : this is the end of all labors in His name ; 
to this all else is tributary and conducive ; and there is no hesita- 
tion as to the visible means by which God will effect this end in all 
those who have ' faith to be healed.' And in this sense it may 
perhaps be said that in Christianity even doctrine holds not indeed 
a subordinate, but (that which involves nothing but dignity) a 
subservient place ; since it is the strength and glory of Christian 
doctrine that it essentially ' leads on to something higher, — to the 
Sacramental participation in the atoning sacrifice of Christ.' 4 

IV. Thus then there appears at the beginning the dominance of 

1 Acts ii. 38, 41, 42. 

2 Cf. Rom. vi. 3, 4 ; Gal. iii. 27, 28 ; Col. ii. 12, 20-23. 
8 Cf. 1 Cor. x. 17, xii. 25, 26. 

* W. Shirley, The Church in the Apostolic Age, p. 103. 



x . Sacraments. 353 

that note which has sounded on through all succeeding ages ; thus 
may we trace from the first days the dispensation of Divine energy 
through agents and acts and efficacious symbols gathered out of this 
visible world. It remains to be shown with what reason it can be 
alleged that herein the Church evinces its recognition of the com- 
plexity of human nature, and guards the truth, that in the entirety 
of his being man has to do with God, the Creator, Redeemer, 
Sanctifier of his soul and body. Along three lines of thought this may 
in some degree appear ; and if the evidence that can be indicated 
is recognized as in any measure real, it would be unphilosophic to 
set it aside because it may be fragmentary and inconclusive : since 
fragments are all that in such a matter we are likely as yet to see. 

(1) First, then, there is a profound, far-reaching import in the 
bare fact that material and visible means are thus hallowed to effect 
the work of God, to bear His unseen grace. For it must not be 
thought that in this Sacramental union of the visible and the invisible 
we have only an interesting parallel to the twofold nature of man, a 
neat and curious symmetry, a striking bit of symbolism or accommo- 
dation. Nor is the deepest significance of the Sacramental principle 
brought out when it is said quite truly that ' it has pleased God to 
bind His invisible operations to outward and visible methods,' f lest 
that which is thus invisible should for that reason be disbelieved or 
counterfeited or in any of the various ways in which human incredu- 
lity or human enthusiasm might do it wrong, abused to the injury of 
man.' * We may see in this aspect of the system that it has indeed 
secondary advantages of the highest worth ; but its surpassing glory is 
in its primary and essential character, as the regular employment of 
visible means for the achievement of Divine mysteries. For thus 
our whole estimate of this world is affected. Its simplest objects 
have their kindred, as it were, in the court, in the very presence 
chamber of the Most High ; and actions such as we see in it day 
after day have been advanced to a supreme distinction. 

And so through Sacramental elements and acts Christianity 
maintains its strong inclusive hold upon the whole of life. The con- 
secration of material elements to be the vehicles of Divine grace 
keeps up on earth that vindication and defence of the material 
against the insults of sham spiritualism which was achieved forever 
by the Incarnation and Ascension of Jesus Christ. We seem to 
see the material world rising from height to height ; pierced, indeed, 
and, as it were, surprised at every stage by strange hints of a destiny 
beyond all likelihood ; yet only gradually laying aside the inertness 

1 Moberly's Bampton Lectures, pp. 29, 30. 
23 



354 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

of its lower forms, gradually seeming to yield itself, not merely to 
the external fashioning of spirit, but also to its inner and transforming 
occupation : till in humanity it comes within sight of that which God 
has been preparing for it, even the reception of His own image and 
likeness. And yet this is but the beginning : and though sin delays 
the end, and holds back the crown of all, it is but for a time ; in 
due season there is made known that absolutely highest honor to 
which God has been leading on the work of His hands, even that 
in its highest type it should be taken into God ; that the Eternal 
Word should be made man, and from a human mother receive our 
nature, so that a material body should be His body ; His in birth, 
and growth, and death ; His in all its relations with the visible world ; 
His for suffering, for weariness, for tears, for hunger ; His upon the 
cross and in the tomb ; His to rise with ; and, at length, His at the 
right hand of God. Thus was the visible received up into glory ; 
thus was the forecast of spiritual capacity in the material perfectly 
realized ; and by the body of the ascended Saviour, an entrance for 
the whole being of man into the realm of spirit is assured. ' There 
is a spiritual body : ' l no part of the material order can be quite 
untouched by the light that issues from those astounding words, 
and from the triumph they record. And that truth, that triumph, 
that possibility of unhindered interpenetration between the spiritual 
and the material is pre-eminently attested upon earth by the 
two great Sacraments of the Christian Church. In those mysteries 
where water is sanctified to the washing away of sin, and where 
material substances are made spiritual food, there is a continual 
witness of the victory that has been won, a real earnest of that 
which shall hereafter be achieved, a vivid declaration that the 
barrier between the spiritual and the material is not absolute or 
eternal. 

Nor is this deep truth without practical and far-reaching con- 
sequences in human life. For immediately it thus appears that 
the unreal spirituality which consists in a barren and boastful dis- 
paragement of ritual observance or of outward acts,' 2 of earthly 
relationships or of secular life, of natural feelings or of bodily 
health, clashes with Christian teaching as sharply as it does with 
human nature and with common-sense. And then, in perfect 
accordance with this principle, the spiritual energy of the Church 
is sacramentally conveyed for the hallowing of stage after stage 
in the due order of a human life, as body, soul, and spirit are 

1 1 Cor. xv. 44. 

2 Cf. Professor Milligan, The Resurrection of Our Lord, Lect. vi. pt. i. § c. 



x. Sacraments. 355 

advanced towards the end for which they were created. Not only 
in the initial act whereby all are bidden to enter into the kingdom 
of God, and at the dawn of consciousness, the onset of evil is 
forestalled by the cleansing and regenerating work of God the 
Holy Ghost, — not only in the ever-needed, ever-ready mystery of 
glory whereby, amidst the stains and sorrows of the world, all may 
again and again be ' filled with the very essence of restoration and 
of life \ ' 1 but at other moments too, when the soul of man rises 
up towards God in the divinely quickened venture of faith, the 
strength of the Most High is perfected in human weakness, and in 
Sacramental acts the things that are not seen enter into the history 
of the things that are seen. It is most unfortunate that the associ- 
ations of controversy should hinder men from frankly and thank- 
fully recognizing the wide range of Sacramental action in Christian 
life. The dispute as to the number of the Sacraments is, indeed, 
' a question of a name ; ' 2 and it ought to have been acknowl- 
edged all along that the name was being used with different and 
shifting meanings. That men knew that it did not designate an 
essentially distinct class of exactly equivalent units is shown on all 
sides. St. Thomas Aquinas seems to doubt, at least, whether 
there are not more than seven Sacraments, divides the seven into 
groups with very important notes of difference, and decides that 
the Eucharist is ' Sacramentorum omnium potissimum ; ' 3 Calvin 
was not unwilling that the laying on of hands should be called a 
Sacrament, though he would not reckon it ' inter ordinaria Sacra- 
menta ; ' 4 the Council of Trent has an anathema for any one who 
says that the seven Sacraments are so equal that none is more 
worthy than another ; 5 Richard Baxter distinguishes between ' three 
sorts of Sacraments ; ' in the second sense of the name, in which it 
is taken to mean ' any solemn Investiture of a person by minis- 
terial delivery, in a state of Church-privileges, or some special 
gospel-mercy,' he grants ' that there are five Sacraments, — Bap- 
tism, Confirmation, Absolution, the Lord's Supper, and Ordina- 
tion ; ' and elsewhere he declares that ' they that peremptorily say 
without distinguishing that there are but two Sacraments in all, do 
but harden them (the Papists) by the unwarrantable narrowing of 
the word.' 6 There is, indeed, no reason why any one should hesi- 

1 Wright's Ancient Collects, p. 152. 

2 C. Gore, Roman Catholic Claims, p. 170. 

3 St. Th., iii. Qu. LXV. Art. 1, 4, 3. * Calv., Inst, IV. xiv. 20. 

5 Cone. Trident, Sess. VII., Can. iii. 

6 Richard Baxter, Confirmation and Restauration, pp. 88, 89 ; Ecclesi- 
astical Cases of Conscience, Qu. 99. Cf. J. S. Pollock, Richard Baxter on 
the Sacraments, § 58. 



356 The Religion of the Incarnation* 

tate to mark the Love of God meeting in Sacramental ordinances 
the need of man at point after point in the course of his probation. 
Differences in the manner of appointment or in the range of appli- 
cation may involve no difference at all in the reality of the power 
exercised and the grace conveyed. And so we may see the Spirit- 
bearing Church, with whole-hearted recognition of all the elements 
and wants of human life, proffering to men through visible means 
the manifold gifts of grace needed for their progress and welfare 
in the way until they reach the Country. As temptation grows 
more complex and severe, and the soul begins to realize the war- 
fare that it has to wage, the Personal indwelling of the Holy 
Ghost, vouchsafed by the laying on of hands, completes the prep- 
aration of Christ's soldier; as the desolating sense of failure 
threatens to unnerve the will and to take such hold upon the soul 
that it is not able to look up, the authoritative message of forgive- 
ness brings again the strength of purity and the light of hope, 
and recalls the scattered forces of the inner life to expel the en- 
croaching evil and to regain whatever had been lost. For special 
vocations there are special means of grace ; by ordination God 
vouchsafes to guilty men the glory of the priesthood ; and in 
Christian marriage He confers the grace that hallows human love 
to be the brightness and the safeguard of an earthly home, and the 
earnest of the home in heaven. And thus in the manifold 
employment of the Sacramental principle there again appears that 
characteristic excellence of Christianity which is secured in the 
very nature of Sacraments ; namely, its recognition of the whole 
problem with which it claims to deal. It speaks to us as we are ; 
there is no true need of which it will not take account ; it will lead 
us without loss to the realization of our entire being. 

(2) Secondly, Sacraments are a constant witness against our 
readiness to forget, to ignore, or to explain away the claim of 
Christianity to penetrate the bodily life, and to affect the body 
itself, replenishing it here with powers which are strange to it, 
lifting it out of the reach or mastery of passions which falsely boast 
that they are congenial with it, leading it on towards its everlasting 
rest, beyond all weakness and dishonor, in the glory of God. 
This claim, with the deeply mysterious but wholly reasonable hope 
which it engenders, has been set forth by Hooker, with his un- 
faltering strength of thought and words : ' Doth any man doubt 
that even from the flesh of Christ our very bodies do receive that life 
which shall make them glorious at the latter day, and for which 
they are already accounted parts of His blessed body? Our cor- 
ruptible bodies could never live the life they shall live, were it not 



x. Sacraments. 357 

that here they are joined with His body, which is incorruptible, 
and that His is in ours as a cause of immortality, — a cause by 
removing, through the death and merit of His own flesh, that 
which hindered the life of ours. Christ is therefore, both as God 
and as man, that true Vine whereof we both spiritually and corporally 
are branches. The mixture of His bodily substance with ours is 
a thing which the ancient Fathers disclaim. Yet the mixture of 
His flesh with ours they speak of, to signify what our very bodies 
through mystical conjunction receive from that vital efficacy which 
we know to be in His ; and from bodily mixtures they borrow 
divers similitudes rather to declare the truth than the manner of 
coherence between His sacred and the sanctified bodies of saints.' 1 
The body, as well as the spirit, is accessible to the Divine life ; 
there are avenues by which the energy of Christ's perfect and 
glorified manhood can penetrate, inform, affect, transfigure, our 
whole being, bodily and spiritual. His prevalence in the life of 
the body and the change He works in it may be very gradual, dis- 
cerned in incoherent fragments, interrupted by surprising disap- 
pointments, hampered by limitations which it would be unlike 
Him now to overbear ; but the change is real. The body is not 
left inert and brutish and uncheered, while the spirit is being car- 
ried on from strength to strength, with growing light and freedom 
and majesty ; it also rises at its Saviour's touch, and finds from 
Him the earnest of its liberation and advancement. 

The work of grace upon the bodily nature of man may indeed 
be a matter of which we ought not to think save very humbly and 
tentatively : it is easy and perilous to overstate or to misread the 
evidence : but there is peril also in ignoring it. The language of 
our Blessed Lord ; the clear conviction of His Apostles ; the 
intrepid quietude of His martyrs ; the patience of the saints ; their 
splendid and unrivalled endurance in His service ; the change 
that may be marked in the looks and voices and instinctive acts 
of some who seem to be most nearly His, — here is such guid- 

1 Hooker, V. lvi. 9 ; cf. E. B. Pusey, University Sermons, p. 11 : ' This is (if 
we may reverently so speak) the order of the mystery of the Incarnation, that 
the Eternal Word so took our flesh into Himself as to impart to it His own 
inherent life ; so then we partaking of it, that life is transmitted on to us 
also, and not to our souls only, but our bodies also, since we become flesh of 
His flesh and bone of His bone, and He Who is wholly life is imparted to us 
wholly. The Life which He is spreads around, first giving its own vitality to 
that sinless flesh which He united indissolubly with Himself, and in it encircling 
and vivifying our whole nature ; and then, through that bread which is His 
flesh, finding an entrance to us individually, penetrating us, soul and body 
and spirit, and irradiating and transforming us into His own light and life.' 



358 The Religion of the Incarnation, 

ance for thought and hope as we ought not to dismiss because we 
cannot make up a theory about it. There are real facts — though 
they may be fragmentary, and require very careful handling — to 
warrant us in praying that our sinful bodies may be made clean by 
His Body, as well as that our souls may be washed by His most 
precious blood. 

It is this truth, with the higher aspirations, the more venturous 
hopes and efforts which it suggests, that the Sacramental system of 
the Church keeps in its due prominence. It is at all events not 
incongruous to think that the spiritual grace which is conveyed 
by visible means may pass through our spiritual nature to tell upon 
that which is visible. He who comes spiritually under a visible 
form may well be believed to work spiritually upon a visible nature. 
It is not, of course, to be thought for a moment that our bodies 
can at all after their own manner receive that Food which is wholly 
spiritual : nor that the visible element in a Sacrament gives to our 
bodies any hold upon the invisible grace, any power to appropriate 
to themselves by their own proper energies that which is incor- 
poreal and supra-sensuous. ' Only the soul or spirit of man can 
take in and feed upon a spiritual nutriment : ' x it is only (so far 
as our thoughts can go) through the avenue, by the medium of 
the faithful soul that the spiritual force of the Sacrament can pene- 
trate to the body. But the fact that the spiritual virtue comes to 
us under a form of which our bodily senses take cognizance is at 
least a pledge that the body is not forgotten in the work of sancti- 
fication. And it is something more than this, — it is an assurance 
of that invasion and penetration of the material by the spiritual 
which is the very ground of all our hope for the redemption of the 
body. There is in the very nature of a Sacrament the forecast of 
some such hope as this, — that He who said of the material 
bread ' This is My Body,' may, in His own time, through changes 
which we cannot imagine, take to Himself and lift into the trans- 
figuring realm of spirit our material bodies as well as our souls ; 
seizing, disclosing, perfecting capacities which under their present 
conditions we hardly suspect in them. And, perhaps, yet more 
than this may be said : for there would seem to be warrant for 
trusting that, in spite of all hindrance and delay, His word of 
power even now goes forth towards this work, and in the holy 
Eucharist has its efficacy throughout our whole nature. It is the 
thought to which Hooker points in words of endless import : 
'there ensueth a kind of transubstantiation in us, a true change 

1 J. B. Mozley, Lectures and other Theological Papers, p. 204. 



x. Sacrameiits. 359 

both of soul and body, an alteration from death to life,' — words 
which rest on those of St. Irenaeus : ' As bread from the earth 
receiving the invocation of God is no longer common bread but 
the Eucharist, consisting of two things, an earthly and a heavenly ; 
so our bodies also receiving the Eucharist are no longer corrupt- 
ible, having the hope of the Resurrection.' * Alike in us and in the 
Sacrament the powers of the world to come invade the present, 
and already move towards the victory which shall be hereafter. 

(3) And thus, in the third place, the ministry of Sacraments is 
a perpetual prophecy of the glory that shall be revealed in us ; 
the glory that shall pervade and transfigure our whole being. 
' Till He come ; ' ' until His coming again ; ' that note of expect- 
ancy, of looking towards the east and watching for the return of a 
great light, discloses a deep truth about the Christian Sacraments. 
They sanction and confirm, as ever-present witnesses of a Divine 
assent, certain thoughts which will not let men rest in any low 
contentment with the things of time — with the approval, the suc- 
cess, the gratification, or the systems of this world. They declare 
with a perpetual insistence the mysteriousness of our present 
being: they have a certain fellowship with those strange flashes 
and pulsations we have felt of a life which seems astray and alien 
here, which yet somehow suggests the thought that could we com- 
mit ourselves wholly to its guidance, could we be replenished with 
its power, we should not walk in darkness, but rather, even in this 
world, be as the children of light : — and so they take the side of 
faith and patience against the attractions of completeness and 
security and achievement and repose. For they offer to guide 
into the way of peace, to welcome into an ordered, hallowed, 
course of loving service and of steady growth, those passing thrills 
of an intenser life, which if they be forgotten, denied, misunder- 
stood, or surrendered to the abuse of wilfulness and vanity, may so 
subtly and terribly be unto us an occasion of falling. 

It is given sometimes to a poet to sink a shaft, as it were, into 
the very depths of the inner life : to penetrate its secret treasuries, 
and to return, Prometheus-like, with a gift of fire and of light to 
men. The venturesome words that record such a moment of 
penetration and insight never lose their power : they seem to have 
caught something of the everlasting freshness of that world of 
which they speak : and one man after another may find in them, 
at some time of need or gladness or awakening, the utterance of 
thoughts which else he might have been too shy or too faint- 

1 Hooker, V. Ixvii. 11. ; St. Irenaeus, iv. 18. 



360 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

hearted to acknowledge even to himself. There is such a splendid 
venture of courage for the truth's sake in those lines of Wordsworth 
which surely no familiarity can deprive of their claim to reverence 
and gratitude, — the lines in which he tells his thankfulness, 

' For those obstinate questionings 
Of sense and outward things, 
Fallings from us, vanishings ; 
Blank misgivings of a creature 
Moving about in worlds not realized, 
High instincts before which our mortal nature 
Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised ; 
. . . Those first affections, 

Those shadowy recollections, 
Which, be they what they may, 
Are yet the fountain-light of all our day, 
Are yet a master-light of all our seeing ; 

Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make 
Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
Of the eternal Silence.' 

It may be doubted whether any life is left wholly unvisited by 
some misgiving, some dim, faltering instinct, some pulse of hope 
or sorrow, which is akin to that which these words disclose ; and 
the moments of such visitation are the supreme opportunities 
of a human soul, the crises of its tragedy. Then the things that 
belong to its peace are being proffered to it; then the Sibyl 
stands before it with the treasures of unimagined wisdom. We 
rise, and we live and grow and see by the right understanding and 
employment of such moments ; by the fresh acts of self-committal 
which they render possible : and in all the infinite pathos of this 
world there is no misery comparable with this, — that they should 
cease to trouble us. Whatever a man may believe or disbelieve, 
he will do well to trust these moments when they come ; and, 
perhaps, if he has grace to know and use them, he may be nearer 
to the kingdom of God than he at all suspects. But Christianity 
does not leave such < shoots of everlastingness ' wholly unexplained 
or unprovided for. 

They are in truth the fountain-light of all our seeing, for they 
are the disclosure, the assertion, the stepping forward of His 
presence who alone sustains our life, our thought, our love. And, 
being this, they are therefore also the tokens, the emerging witness 
of a work that has begun in us, a life that is astir, a process of 
change that may be carried forward to an issue which, even faintly 
surmised, might make all other desire die away in us. 

That we should be perfectly set free from sin ; that God should 
so dwell in us and pervade our whole being that no part should 



x. Sacraments. 361 

lag behind the other ; that whatsoever weakness or reluctance or 
coarseness may have clung about the body here should utterly pass 
away, being driven back by the victorious onset of the Spirit of 
God, claiming us wholly, body, soul, and spirit for His own ; that 
whatsoever pure and true delight has here engaged us should be 
found, faultless and unwearied, in that energy which shall be at 
once our work and our rest forever, — this is how Christianity repre- 
sents to us the end of our development ; and if indeed the powers 
which are to achieve so vast a change are already setting about 
their work in us, it is not strange that we should be disturbed now 
and then with some suspicion of it. We may understand alike 
the severity of external discipline, and the sharp disturbance and 
upheaval of anything like complacency, in a nature that is being 
here led on. towards so splendid and inconceivable a transfiguration. 
But Christianity does not merely declare to us the origin and 
meaning of these strange invasions of our ordinary life ; these 
emergings, as it were, of that which is behind our normal activity, 
when the light, the strength, the love in which alone we live seems 
to push aside the curtain on which the background of our daily 
life is painted, and to appear unveiled among the things of time. 
He who telleth the number of the stars and calleth them all by 
their names, He who sendeth the springs into the valleys, and 
sweetly and mightily ordereth all things ; He would not have these 
moments of intenser life, of keener consciousness, of quicker and 
more excellent growth, to be precarious and unaccountable, to be 
abrupt and arbitrary as the rush of the meteor which is gone before 
the eye has clearly seen it, or could use its light. They come from 
Him ; they are the moments in which He makes His power to be 
known ; in which His hand is felt, and His voice pervades the soul ; 
the moments when His presence advances, as it were, and bends 
over us, and we know that it is He Himself. And must we 
merely wait in blank and idle helplessness for that which we so 
greatly need ; for that which is our only source of strength and 
growth? Must we wait, flagging and fruitless, with just a vague 
hope that the quickening presence may chance to visit us again, 
lighting on us with arbitrary beneficence, as the insect lights upon 
the plant, that it may bring forth fruit in due season? Must 
we wonder through days and months, yes, and through years, 
perhaps of dim and desolate bewilderment, whether it was a real 
presence that came to us; with nothing but the fading memory 
of an individual and unconfirmed impression to sustain our 
hope, to keep the door against the gathering forces of doubt 
and worldliness and despair ? Must we find our way as best we 



362 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

can, by guidance given long ago, imperfectly realized even then, 
and more and more hazily remembered, more drearily inadequate 
as time goes on, and the path grows rougher and less clear? Is 
the greatest effort to be demanded of us just when our strength 
is least and our light lowest ? l Surely it is not His way to be thus 
arbitrary in compassion, thus desultory and precarious in showing 
mercy. Surely He would not have us stray and faint and suffer 
thus. No, His compassions fail not ; and, with the orderliness of 
a father's love, He has made us sure of all we need ; and the his- 
toric Church and the triumphs of His saints declare that He is 
true. He has, with the certainty of His own unchanging word, 
promised that the unseen gift, which is the power of saintliness in 
sinful man, shall be given to all faithful, humble souls by ordered 
means through appointed acts. We need not vaguely hope that 
we may somehow receive His grace; for He has told us where 
and how we are to find it, and what are the conditions of its 
unhindered entrance into our souls. We need not be always going 
back to wonder whether our sins have been forgiven, or laboriously 
stirring up the glow of a past conviction ; for there is a ministry 
which He has empowered to convey to us that cleansing glory 
which is ever ready to transfigure penitence into peace and thanks- 
giving. We need not live an utterly unequal life, stumbling to and 
fro between our ideal and our caricature ; 2 for He has prepared 
for us a way which leads from strength to strength ; and we know 
where He is ready to meet us and to replenish us with life and 
light. There is a glory that shall be revealed in us ; and here on 
earth we may so draw near and take it to ourselves that its quiet 
incoming tide may more and more pervade our being ; with radi- 
ance ever steadier and more transforming ; till, in this world and 
beyond it, He has made a perfect work ; till we are wholly ruled 
and gladdened by His presence, and wholly wrought into His 
image. For not by vague waves of feeling or by moments of 
experience which admit no certain measure, no unvarying test, no 
objective verification, but by an actual change, a cleansing and 
renewal of our manhood, a transformation which we can mark in 
human lives and human faces, or trace in that strange trait of saint- 
liness which Christianity has wrought into the rough fabric of 
human history, may the reality of Sacramental grace be known on 
earth ; known clearly enough, at all events, to make us hopeful 
about its perfect work in those who shall hereafter be presented 
faultless in body, soul, and spirit before the throne of God. 

1 Cf. A. Knox, ii. 234-6. 

2 Cf. Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, p. 182. 



XI. 

CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICS. 



W. J. H. CAMPION. 



XI. 



CHRISTIANITY AND POLITICS. 

The aim of this essay is to investigate some of the relations of 
Christianity to human society, and to point out some of the main 
lines of influence which the Christian Church brings to bear on the 
organized centres of social life. 

We are met at the outset by two widely differing conceptions of 
the mode and direction in which Christianity acts as a regenerat- 
ing influence on the life of mankind. On the one side, Christian- 
ity is identified with civilization, and the function of the Church is 
regarded as simply the gathering up, from age to age, of the higher 
aspirations of mankind : her call is to enter into, to sympathize 
with, and to perpetuate whatever is pure, noble, and of good re- 
port in laws and institutions, in art, music, and poetry, in industry 
and commerce, as well as in the moral and religious usages and 
beliefs of mankind. Christianity is thus not a higher order, stand- 
ing over against and correcting a lower, but is itself the product or 
rather the natural outgrowth of the progressive moral consciousness 
of mankind. The value of this mode of thought is in emphasizing 
the sacredness of secular interests and duties, and in its protest 
against dividing the field of conscience, and assigning to the one 
part a greater sanctity than to the other. ' As our salvation 
depends as certainly upon our behavior in things relating to civil life 
as in things relating to the service of God, it follows that they are both 
equally matters of conscience and salvation.' x Its weakness lies in 
its not sufficiently recognizing one decisive fact of human nature, 
the fact of sin. No one, as it seems to us, looking at human nature, 
in himself or others, with clear, open, unprejudiced eyes, can doubt 
the existence of sin, its corrupting influence on the whole nature, 
and yet its fundamental unnaturalness. But if states and societies 
are as the individuals who compose them, then any theory of society 

1 Law, Third Letter to the Bishop of Bangor, second edition, 1762, p. 66. 



366 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

must rest on the theory of man ; and the theory of man is imper- 
fect unless it recognizes the fact of sin. 

On the other hand the recoil from secularism, or the overwhelm- 
ing sense of the power and destructiveness of sin in the lives of 
men and of societies, leads others to draw sharp the distinction 
between things sacred and things secular. The order of things, it 
is said, of which the Incarnation is the starting-point, is admittedly 
higher than that secular order which existed before it, and which 
even now surrounds it as darkness encompasses light. Let us put 
on one side political life, local and national interests, all that sphere 
of mixed social relations, which is so imperfect, so full of fierce 
passions, of strife, envy, and ambition, so productive of distractions 
and entanglements. Let us concentrate our own thoughts on sin, 
and devote our own lives to its remedy. Let us at least keep our 
own hands clean, and use for our own discipline that narrower 
sphere which is sufficient. No doubt individuals will find their 
vocation in some such attitude as this : and for some it may be 
wise to abstain from political and social interests, in order thus to 
strengthen their influence in other directions. But we are not now 
considering the call of individual Christians, but the attitude of the 
Christian Church as a whole : and it would be easy to accumulate 
references to show that the leading minds of Christendom have 
declined to recognize, except in cases of special vocation, as the 
duty of Christians the abdication of responsibility for the prob- 
lems, the entanglements, the more or less secular issues of the 
ordinary social life of mankind. Christianity, in the words of a 
modern writer, has both to deliver humanity from its limitations, 
and to bring it to a true knowledge of itself. 1 

These two conceptions of the relation of the Christian society to 
the issues and interests of the life amid which it moves, correspond 
to two aspects of the Incarnation, which the deepest Christian 
thought holds in solution. On the one side, the human life of the 
Word of God may be regarded as a fulfilment, the restoration of 
an order, marred, indeed, and broken, but never completely lost, 
the binding together of all truth, all goodness, all beauty, into one 
perfect life ; on the other it is a reversal, the beginning of a new 
order, the undoing of a great wrong which has eaten deep into 
human nature, the lifting up of mankind out of the helpless slavery 
of sin into the freedom of righteousness. These two aspects of the 
Incarnation are not contradictory, but complementary. However 

1 Martensen, Christian Ethics, special part, second division, English trans- 
lation, p. 98. 



xi. Christianity and Politics. 367 

difficult it may be for us to find their unity in thought, they had 
their unity in a life. 

In the same way, the problem with which Christianity has to deal 
in its relations to human society has two sides. It cannot hold 
itself aloof from the great currents and movements of that ever- 
flowing and ebbing human life, in which it shares, which it has 
to redeem, to purify, and to quicken. ' In the great sea of human 
society, part of it, yet distinguishable from it, is the stream of the 
existence of the Church.' * And yet it has to maintain as a debt 
it owes to future generations as well as the present, the purity of 
its own moral standard, the independence of its own deepest life. 

To spiritualize life without ceasing to be spiritual, to maintain a 
high morality while at the same time interpenetrating a non-Chris- 
tian or very imperfectly Christianized society with its own moral 
habits and manners, is a task which presupposes great cohesion 
and tenacity on the part of the Christian Church. And it is for 
that reason that in speaking of the Church we shall have mainly in 
view that solid, highly articulated, permanent core of Christendom, 2 
which, however broken into fragments, and weakened by its own 
divisions, maintains a clearly marked type, on the side of doctrine 
in its creeds and sacred writings, on the side of worship in its sac- 
raments and traditional liturgies, on the side of organization in its 
ministry, as well as holding the life of Christ its standard of perfect 
living. Those Christian bodies which float, more or less closely 
knit together, around the central core of the Church, have often 
rendered great services in advancing on special points the standard 
of social and personal morality, and they are more flexible, and 
able rapidly to throw themselves into new crusades ; but it may 
well be doubted if their work could have been done at all without 
the more rigid and stable body behind them, with its slow move- 
ments, but greater Catholicity of aim and sympathy ; and certainly 
it would in the long run have been better done^ if, like the great 
monastic bodies, they had remained as distinct organizations 
within the Church. 

What, then, is the attitude of the Church towards human society, 
and especially towards human society as gathered up and concen- 
trated in States ? What duties does it recognize towards nations, 
towards human society as a whole ? 

I. There is a certain order of debated questions, on which it 
cannot be said that the Christian Church is pledged to one side or 
the other, — she leaves them open. Individual Christians take one 

1 Church, Oxford House Papers, No. xvii., The Christian Church, p. 10. 

2 Holland, Creed and Character, first edition, 1887, p. 156. 



368 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

side or the other. The Christian society recognizes that the differ- 
ences are due to diversities of temperament and national character, 
and to the varying conditions under which human societies live, and 
therefore that they may be best left to human experience to solve. 

In this class of questions would come the problem debated 
since the time of Herodotus, but to which no general answer is 
really possible : What is the best form of government ? On this 
problem the Church is, so to speak, frankly opportunist. Here we 
may quote the view of St. Augustine, as stated in the De Civitate 
Dei : 1 ' The Heavenly City, in its wanderings on earth, summons 
its citizens from among all nations, . . . being itself indifferent to 
whatever differences there may be in the customs, laws, and insti- 
tutions by which earthly peace is sought after or preserved, not res- 
cinding or destroying any of them, but rather keeping and following 
after them as different means adopted by different races for obtain- 
ing the one common end of earthly peace, provided only they are 
no obstacle to the religion by which men are taught the worship of 
the one supreme and true God.' In the same spirit, in his dialogue 
De libero Arbitrio? he dwells on the mutable character of human 
law. That law is temporal, which, ' though just, may yet be justly 
changed from time to time,' L e., as the conditions change. Thus, 
a Democracy is best adapted to a grave and temperate people, 
public-spirited and willing to make sacrifices for the common good ; 
while it is better for a more corrupt, more easily flattered people, 
greedy of private gain, to be under an Aristocracy or a Monarchy. 
Or if we wish for a more modern statement of the traditional view 
of the Christian Church, we shall find it in an encyclical letter 3 of 
Leo XIII. : ' The right of sovereignty in itself is not necessarily 
united with any particular form of government : it can rightly as- 
sume, now one form, now another, provided only that each of these 
forms does in very deed secure useful results and the common 
good.' It will be noticed that two qualifications are introduced, 
the one by St. Augustine, the other by Pope Leo, limiting their 
acceptance of all forms of government. It is possible for Christian 
citizens to take an active part in every de facto government which 
(1) does not hinder the free and peaceable practice of the Chris- 
tian religion, and (2) whose' real aim is the common good, and 
which does, in fact, work for the advantage of its subjects. Not 
all governments, even in the nineteenth century, satisfy these tests. 

In the same way, there have been the widest differences between 
Christian thinkers on the most important questions, in which auto- 

1 xix. 17. 2 i. 6. 3 Immortal e Dei. 



xi. Christianity and Politics. 369 

cratic and democratic leanings show themselves, such, for instance, 
as that of the origin of sovereignty, i. e. of that rule of man over 
man, which is the foundation of civil society. The view indicated, 
though not worked out, by St. Augustine, 1 that the rule of man 
over man had its origin in the Fail, and was therefore part of the 
secondary, not the primary condition of mankind, is used by Greg- 
ory VII. as a weapon of assault on the temporal power, by Bossuet 
as a safe ground on which to rest the duty of obedience to an abso- 
lute Monarchy. The other side is taken by St. Thomas Aquinas. 
He finds the origin of temporal rule in the social nature of man, 
accepting and making his own the Aristotelian account of man as 
by nature a being fitted for a common life. Thus, in a state of 
innocence there would have been no slavery indeed, but govern- 
ment, with its recognition of the differences in ability and knowl- 
edge among men, and of the consequent duty incumbent on the 
wise and experienced of using their faculties for the common good. 
Political rule would thus be, not a consequence of sin, but a result 
of man's inherently social nature. 

Differences such as these among those who equally start from 
fundamentally Christian presuppositions can only be taken to show 
that we are wrong in supposing that the Christian Church is bound 
up with either of the two great political leanings which have 
appeared in civil communities in all ages of the world, and which 
have their ground in human nature itself. ' In every country of 
civilized man, acknowledging the rights of property, and by means 
of determined boundaries and common laws, united into one 
people or nation, the two antagonist powers or opposite interests 
of the State ... are those of permanence and of progression.' 2 
The Church recognizes these diverse powers or interests as natural, 
and therefore accepts the fact of their existence, without identify- 
ing herself with either of them. 

II. But it would surely be a mistake to suppose that because 
the Church is neutral on certain questions of Politics that there- 
fore she has no direct teaching to give on the vital questions which 
arise with regard to the organized common life of mankind. In 
the rebound from the minimizing views of the function of the 
State, which were associated in England with the Ricardian School 
of Economics and the philosophic Radicalism of J. S. Mill, men 
are ready to go all lengths in exalting the position of the State as 
the moral guide of social life. The tendency is to assign the 

1 Aug., de Civ. Dei, xix. 14, 15. 

2 S. T. Coleridge, Church and State, edited by H. N, Coleridge, 1839, 
p. 24. 

24 



370 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

whole sphere of public morals to the State, and ' private ' morals 
to the individual, acting, if he pleases, under the guidance of one 
or other of the Christian bodies. However much we may welcome 
the freer recognition of corporate responsibility, and the nobler 
conception of the State as having a moral end ; yet we cannot 
help perceiving that certain limitations are, as by a self-acting law, 
imposed on its moral influence. 

(i) The State has been called the 'armed conscience of the 
community.' 1 Looked at on the moral side, as a guide of the 
conscience of individuals, its arms are its defect. But that defect 
is not remediable : it is inevitable. For the State has to deal with 
various grades of character, responding to a vast complexity of 
motives, which may be roughly classified under three heads, those 
of duty, self-interest, fear of punishment. To some ' you ought ' 
is a sufficient appeal ; to others ' you had better ; ' while to a third 
class the only effective appeal is ' you must.' Now the State in 
order to perform its most elementary business, that of securing the 
conditions of an ordered and civilized life, has to deal first of all with 
those who are only susceptible of the lowest motive, — the dread 
of punishment. And in dealing with them, it must of necessity 
use coercive force. 2 But the force-associations which thus grow 
up around all State-action weaken and enervate its appeal to the 
higher motives, those of duty and rational self-interest. The very 
suspicion of compulsion taints the act done from duty. 

Again, there can be little doubt of the vast influence exercised 
on morals by human law and institutions. It is well known to 
those who are at all acquainted with the life of the poor in large 
towns, that in many cases conscience is mainly informed by posi- 
tive law. But all that human law can do is to secure a minimum 
of morality. 3 No doubt it is true that indirectly positive law can 
do something more than this, because good citizens will abstain 
from all actions which, in however remote a degree, are likely to 
bring them into collision with the law. But in the main it is true 
to say that what law can secure is the observance on pain of pun- 
ishment of a minimum moral standard, which itself shifts with the 
public opinion of society, rising as it rises, falling as it falls. 

Certainly the State is sacred : it is ' of God : ' it is no necessary 
evil : but a noble organ of good living. But yet there are these nat- 
ural limitations to the effective exercise of its functions, as a moral 

1 A. C. Bradley, 'Aristotle's Conception of the State,' in Hellenica, 1880, 
p. 243. 

2 'Metu coercet,' Aug., de lib. Arb., i. 15. 

3 Compare Aug., de lib. Arb., i. 5. 



xi. Christianity and Politics. 371 

guide. Firstly, it has to use force, and, therefore, its appeal to the 
higher motive is weakened. Secondly, it can only secure a minimum 
of morality, shifting with the general morality of the community. 

Now it is exactly at these points that the Church steps in to 
supplement the moral action of the State, not as one part sup- 
plements another part of a single whole, but rather as a higher 
supplements a lower order. 

It is in its appeal to the higher motives that the State is weak : 
it is in its appeal to the higher motives that the Church is strong. 
If there have been times when the Church has allowed herself to 
claim or to assume temporal power, or without assuming it, to be 
so closely implicated with the secular authority that Church and 
State appeared to men as one body interested in and maintaining 
the existing order, if she has used the weapons of persecution, or 
handed men over to the secular arm, then has she so far weakened 
and loosened her own hold on the higher motives which move 
men to action. She may have become apparently more powerful, 
but it has always been at the cost, perhaps unperceived at the time, 
of some sacrifice of her own spirituality, and of the loftiness of that 
moral appeal in which her true strength lies. ' There is something 
in the very spirit of the Christian Church which revolts from the 
application of coercive force.' * 

And so, alongside of the moral minima of the secular law, the 
Christian Church maintains moral maxima, moral ideals, or rather 
a moral ideal, ' Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which 
is in heaven is perfect.' 2 ' Till we all come unto a perfect man, 
unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ.' 3 It is 
not that the law is undervalued, or contemned, but that Christians 
are urged to bring their conduct under principles which will carry 
them far beyond the mere obedience to law. It is sufficient to 
quote from the Sermon on the Mount, ' Blessed are the meek . . . 
Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and 
say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake ... I say 
unto you, that ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee 
on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man 
will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy 
cloke also.' 4 

The law and institutions of a people rest upon and give expres- 
sion to a group of moral principles and ideals ; they are not the 
only realization of those principles and ideals, but one ; art and 



1 Art. on ' Future Retribution/ Church Quarterly, July, 1888. 

2 St. Matt. v. 48. 3 Eph. iv. 13. * St. Matt. v. 5, 11, 39, 40. 



372 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

literature would be others ; further, they realize them mainly on the 
negative side, in the mode of prohibition. As that group of prin- 
ciples and ideals changes, they change, sometimes for the better, 
sometimes for the worse. At first sight it seems as if there was no 
essential difference in this respect between the laws and institutions 
of a nation, and the manners and institutions of the Christian 
Church, except that the one gives a more positive and constructive 
expression to the irioral standard of the time than the other. But 
there is this difference, that the Christian Church has its moral 
standard in the past, in the life of the Son of Man ; it too recog- 
nizes change, as age succeeds age, but the new duties are regarded 
not as new, but as newly brought forth out of an already existing 
treasure, as the completer manifestation under new conditions of 
the meaning of the life of Christ. On the threshold of Christian 
morality there lies that by which all its subsequent stages may be 
tested, and which is the measure of advance or retrogression. It is 
this permanent element, preceding the element of change and of 
development, in Christian morality, which gives it its authority as 
against the moral product of one nation or one age. 

It is exactly this authority which has enabled the Church to 
appeal with such force to duty as precedent to right, and to love as 
higher than justice. We can best illustrate this steady appeal to 
higher motives by tracing the steps by which Christian teachers 
have brought out, one by one, the different aspects of the relations 
of governors and governed looked at in the light of Christian 
anthropology and Christian sociology. The first principles govern- 
ing the attitude of individual Christians towards the various organ- 
izations of human society are laid down in the words of Christ, 
' Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God 
the things that are God's.' 1 The command, taken in connec- 
tion with its context, involves two principles : first, the recognition 
of the claims of civil society, and, secondly, their limitation by a 
higher order of claims, where they come into conflict with the first. 
The passage in the Epistle to the Romans, 2 in which St. Paul deals 
with the duties of Christians towards ' the powers that be,' is a com- 
mentary on his Master's teaching. It shows the connection of the 
first of these principles with the second, by tracing it back to its 
ground in the will of God. It brings it into relation to love, 
the central motive of the Christian character. Briefly summarized, 
the stages of St. Paul's argument are as follows : (i) he shows that 
all power is of Divine origin ; ' there is no power but of God.' 

1 St. Matt. xxii. 21. 

2 Rom. xiii. t-io. Compare St. Peter's teaching in t St. Pet. ii. 13-17- 



xi. Christianity and Politics. 373 

Thus those who wield secular power are ministers of God. (2) 
The administration of earthly rewards and punishments by the 
secular power makes for good, and for this reason God uses it in 
His governance of the world. Therefore temporal authority is to 
be obeyed ' not only for wrath, but also for conscience' sake,' i. <?., 
not merely to avoid earthly punishment, but as a duty. (3) This 
duty may be regarded as one application of the general maxim of 
justice, ' Render to all their dues.' But (4) all these scattered dues 
are to a Christian summed up under one vast debt, always in pro- 
cess of payment, but never completely paid. ' Owe no man any- 
thing, but to love one another.' ' Love is the fulfilling of the law.' 
These passages of the New Testament put in the clearest light the 
duty of obedience to civil authority. They lay down its theological 
ground in the derivation of all power from God ; and its moral 
ground by showing that such obedience is one form of justice, and 
justice itself one aspect of love. They thus give to the commands 
of those wielding authority in human society the firmest sanctions. 
If on the one side Christianity seems to set up conscience, as the 
guardian of the things of God, against positive law, it gives on the 
other a Divine sanction and consecration to the whole order of 
things connected with the State by showing its ministerial relation 
to, its denned place and function in, God's ordering of the world. 

This was the side of our Lord's saying which needed enforcing 
on the Christians of St. Paul's time. The civil authority was the 
Roman Empire with its overwhelming force and its almost entire 
externality to Christianity. The danger, then, was the spirit of 
passionate revolt against the secular power. Men who were filled 
with the new wine of the Spirit, who were turning the world upside 
down, found it hard to submit to the decrees of an alien power, 
wielded by heathen : they pleaded their Christian liberty ; they 
could not understand that such a power was i ordained of God.' 
The early Christian Fathers found it sufficient, even when the 
Roman Empire was gradually becoming Christian, to bring home 
to consciences the teaching of St. Paul. There was no need then 
to emphasize in words the other side of our Lord's saying. There 
was little danger of undue subservience to the civil power being 
regarded with anything but disapproval : the danger was of men 
not giving it the obedience which was its due. 'We honor the 
Emperor,' says Tertullian, 1 'so far as we may, and so far as honor 
is due to him, as the first after God ... as one who has only God 
for his superior.' 'If the Emperor demands tribute,' says 
Ambrose, 2 ' we do not refuse it : the lands of the Church pay 
1 Ad Scap., ii. 2 Oratio in Auxentium de basilicis tradendis. 



374 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

tribute ; if the Emperor wishes for our lands, he has the power to 
take them — none of us will resist him . . . we render to Caesar what 
is Caesar's.' St. Augustine, with his Stoical leaning and his Roman 
sense of order, was little inclined to encourage men to resist, in 
any case, established powers. ' What matters it under whose rule 
a man lives who is to die, provided only his rulers do not force him 
to do impious and unjust things?' 1 Only in one passage of St. 
Chrysostom, 2 among the writers of the first four centuries, is a gloss 
given to St. Paul's words, ' There is no power but of God,' which 
distinguishes the delegation of power in general from God, and the 
delegation of power by God to any particular ruler, and so 
suggests the possibility of a de facto ruler to wriom obedience was 
not due. 

But this attitude of the early Christian teachers was a very dif- 
ferent thing from that attitude of the English Caroline divines, 
which gave so fatal a bent to the teaching of the English Church 
of the seventeenth century in the sphere which lies on the border- 
land of Theology and Politics. What the early Fathers taught 
their Christian followers was that it was their duty to obey in secu- 
lar matters the powers lawfully set over them. What the English 
divines taught was the Divine right of princes, and the subjects' 
duty of non-resistance. In the great battle which was being 
fought out in England between arbitrary power and freedom, they 
threw the whole weight of the English Church on the side of the 
former. It was a fatal error as a matter of policy, for it was the 
losing side. But what is hardly sufficiently realized, it was most 
untrue to the tradition of the Church, and of the Church in 
England. 

It was contrary to the tradition of the Church. For after 
the rise of Christianity to the high places of the world, followed 
by the break-up of the Roman Empire, and the formation of 
the mediaeval States, weakly knit together by personal ties, and 
with uncertain claims on the allegiance of their subjects, two 
new aspects of the relations of governors and governed had been 
brought out in Christian teaching. First, stress was laid on the 
duty of those holding power. Emperors and kings, magistrates 
and officers, who were Christians, had a claim for guidance and 
instruction in the exercise of their various functions. The claim 
was met by showing them that, whatever the earthly source of 
authority may be, all just power is of God, and therefore must be 

1 Aug., de Civ. Dei, v. 17 ; but cp. De bono Conj., 16, for a recognition of 
the possibility of the unjust use of legitimate power. 

2 Horn, xxiii. on Rom. xiii. 1. 



xi. Christianity and Politics, 375 

regarded, not as a privilege, nor as a personal right, but as a trust 
to be undertaken for the good of others, and as a ministry for 
God and man. Thus a government which has for its aim anything 
else than the common good is, properly speaking, not a govern- 
ment at all. Whether its form is monarchical or not, it is simply 
a tyranny. 1 Secondly, the Middle Age theologians supplemented 
St. Paul's teaching by showing the possible right of resistance to 
an unlawful government, or to one that failed to perform its duties. 
Such right of resistance might arise in two cases : (1) that of 
unjust acquisition of power, (2) that of its unjust use. Unjust 
acquisition might take place in two ways : (a) when an unworthy 
person acquired power, but by legitimate means : in this case it 
was the duty of subjects to submit, because the form of power 
came from God ; (fr) when power was acquired by force or fraud : 
in this case, subjects had the right to depose the ruler, if they had 
the power, supposing, however, that the illegitimate assumption of 
power had not been legitimated by subsequent consent. Unjust 
use might also take place in two ways : {a) when the ruler com- 
manded something contrary to virtue, in which case it was a duty 
to disobey ; or (J?) when he went outside his rights, in which case 
subjects were not bound to obey, but it was not necessarily their 
duty to disobey. And so cases might arise in which it was lawful 
to enfranchise oneself, even from a legitimate power. ' Some who 
have received power from God, yet if they abuse it, deserve to 
have it taken from them. Both the one and the other come of 
God.' 2 

Nor was the political teaching of the Caroline divines in 
agreement with the tradition of the Church in England. It is not 
necessary to go back to the great Archbishops who led, in earlier 
days, the struggle for English freedom. It is sufficient to recur to 
the teaching of the greatest of English post-Reformation theolo- 
gians, at once soaked through and through with the spirit of 
Catholic antiquity, and in complete agreement with the English 
Reformation settlement. Richard Hooker had no sympathy with 
that doctrine of Divine right which his mediaeval masters looked 
upon as a quasi-heretical doctrine. 3 He found the first origin of 

1 Tyrannicide was defended by some of the more extreme opponents of 
the temporal power, like John of Salisbury, the secretary of Thomas Becket 
(Policraticus, viii. 17: ' Tyrannus pravitatis imago; plerumque etiam occi- 
dendus'). But it was condemned by the sounder judgment of Aquinas (De 
Reg. Princ, i. 6: 'Hoc apostolicas doctrinae non congruit'). 

2 Thomas Aquinas, Comm. Sent., xliv. q. 2 a. 2 ; q. I a. 2. In Comm. 
Pol., v. 1, § 2, he goes so far as to make insurrection in certain cases a duty. 

3 Janet, Histoire de la Science politique, third edition, 1887, i. 330. 



376 The Religion of the Incarnation.' 

government in the consent of the governed, and he anticipates 
Hobbes and Locke in his account of the ' first original convey- 
ance, when power was derived from the whole into one.' x Further, 
he points out that the king's power is strictly limited (except in the 
case of conquest or of special appointment by God), not only by 
the original compact, but also by after- agreement made with the 
king's consent or silent allowance. 2 And men are not bound 
in conscience to obey such usurpers ' as in the exercise of their 
power do more than they have been authorized to do.' 3 But 
on the other hand, he maintains strongly, as against those who 
thought that human laws could in no sort touch the conscience, 
the duty of civil obedience in agreement with the law of God, 
and the sacredness, the ' Divine institution,' of duly constituted 
authority, whether ' God Himself doth deliver, or men by light of 
nature find out the kind thereof.' 

Thus, the main points which have been brought out by Christian 
teaching as to the relation of Christian citizens to the civil 
authority are: (1) first and foremost, the duty of obedience for 
conscience' sake, — a duty which stands on the same level, and is 
invested with the same sanctions, as the most sacred claims : 

(2) the duty, in case of the civil authority issuing commands 
contrary to virtue or religion, of disobedience on the same 
grounds as those which lead to obedience in the former case ; 

(3) the duty of those wielding authority to use it for the common 
good, and so as not to hinder, if they cannot promote, the 
Christian religion ; (4) the right, which may be said in certain 
extreme cases to rise almost to a duty, of resistance to the arbitrary 
or unconstitutional extension of authority to cases outside its 
province. 

The same emphasis on higher motives is characteristic of Chris- 
tian treatment of the questions connected with property. Chris- 
tianity is certainly not pledged to uphold any particular form of 
property as such. Whether property had better be held by 
individuals, or by small groups, as in the case of the primitive 
Teutonic villages, or of the modern Russian or Indian village 
communities, or again by the State, as is the proposal of Socialists, 
is a matter for experience and common-sense to decide. But 
where Christian ethics steps in is, firstly, to show that property is 
secondary, not primary, a means, and not an end. Thus, in so 



1 Hooker, Eccl. Pol., VIII. ii. 5, 9. Cp. I. x. 4. 

2 Eccl. Pol., VITT. ii. 11, 

s Eccl. Pol., VIII. App. No, I. (ed. Keble). Cp. I. x. 8. 



xi. Christianity and Politics. 377 

far as Socialism looks to the moral regeneration of society by a 
merely mechanical alteration of the distribution of the products of 
industry or of the mode of holding property, it has to be reminded 
that a change of heart and will is the only true starting-point of 
moral improvement. On the other hand, it cannot be too often 
asserted that the accumulation of riches is not in itself a good at 
all. Neither riches nor poverty make men better in themselves. 
Their effect on character depends on the use made of them, 
though no doubt the responsibility of those who have property is 
greater, because they have one instrument the more for the pur- 
poses of life. And so, secondly, Christianity urges that if there is 
private property, its true character as a trust shall be recognized, 
its rights respected, and its attendant duties performed. These 
truths it keeps steadily before men's eyes by the perpetual object- 
lesson of the life of the early Church of Jerusalem, in which those 
who had property sold it, and brought the proceeds and laid them 
at the Apostles' feet, and distribution was made unto every man 
according to his needs, 1 — an object-lesson enforced and renewed 
by the example of the monastic communities, with their vow of 
voluntary poverty, and their common purse. So strongly did the 
early Fathers insist on the duty, almost the debt, of the rich to the 
poor, that isolated passages may be quoted which read like a 
condemnation of all private property ; 2 but this was not their real 
drift. The obligation which they urged was the obligation of 
charity. 

(2) So far we have considered the way in which Christianity 
has strengthened and defined on the side of duty, which itself is 
one form of charity or love, the motives which make men good 
citizens, good property-holders, and so has supplemented the 
moral forces of the State, by raising the common standard of 
opinion and conviction on which ultimately all possibility of State- 
action rests. But the word ' charity ' is used not only in the wider, 
but also in a narrower sense, of one special form of love, the love 
of the strong who stoops to help the weak. 

It is admitted on all hands that charity in this sense has been 
a mark of the Christian type of character ; but the uniqueness of 
Christian charity has probably been exaggerated. The better 
Stoics recognized the active service of mankind, and especially of 

1 Acts iv. 34, 35. 

2 Especially in St. Ambrose ; the passages are collected in Dubief, Essai 
sur les idees politiques de S. Augustin, 1859, ch. vi. St. Augustine himself 
opposed the obligatory Communism, advocated by Pelagianism ; cp. Ep. 157 
(ed Bened.) to Hilary, quoted by Dubief. 



378 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

the poor and miserable, as part of the ideal of a perfect life. 
Their severity was crossed by pity. As Seneca puts it in one 
pregnant phrase, they held that ' wherever a man is, there is room 
for doing good.' x And so Stoicism had its alimentationes, or 
homes for orphan children, its distributions of grain, its provisions 
for the sick and for strangers. 2 Christianity and Stoicism, it may 
seem, were walking along the same road ; but the difference was 
this, ' what pagan charity was doing tardily, and as it were with 
the painful calculation of old age, the Church was doing, almost 
without thinking about it, in the plenary masterfulness of youth, 
because it was her very being thus to do.' 3 She did it with all 
the ease and grace of perfect naturalness, not as valuing charity 
without love, for ' if I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and 
if I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profiteth me 
nothing,' 4 but because love forthwith blossomed forth into charity. 
' And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch. And 
in these days came prophets from Jerusalem unto Antioch. And 
there stood up one of them named Agabus, and signified by the 
spirit that there should be great dearth throughout all the world. 
. . . Then the disciples, every man according to his ability, deter- 
mined to send relief unto the brethren which dwelt in Judaea.' 5 

And so it became the recognized and traditional duty of the 
Church to maintain the cause of the weak against the strong, of 
the poor against the rich, of the oppressed against the oppressors. 
The Bishops of the fourth and fifth centuries exercised ' a kind of 
religious tribunate.' 6 In the Middle Ages the Church urged on 
those in public and private stations the duties of charity, pity, 
humanity. The author of the latter part of the De Regimi?ie 
Principum: Y ascribed to St. Thomas Aquinas, lays down as one of 
the chief duties of a king, the care of the weak and the succor of 
the miserable. Nor did the Church in England in pre-Reforma- 
tion times fail in her duty in this respect. She pleaded for the 
manumission or at least the humane usage of the serfs. She 
undertook through her monasteries the relief of the poor. Her 
prohibition of usury, however mistaken it may seem to us, was a 
real protection to debtors against one of the worst forms of 

1 Sen., de vita beata, 24. • 

2 Uhlhorn, Christian Charity in the Ancient Church, Eng. transl., 1883, 
Bk. I. ch. i. pp. 18-21, 41, 42. 

3 Pater, Marius the Epicurean, Vol. II. ch. xxn. p. 127. 
* iCor. xiii.3(R. V.). 

5 Acts xi. 26-29; cp. also Acts iv. 34, 35, quoted above. 

6 Dubief, p. 11. 

7 ". 15- 



xi. Christianity and Politics. 379 

tyranny, that of the unscrupulous creditor. Since the Reformation 
her record has not been so clean. The shock of the Reformation 
left her weak. The traditional sanctions of her authority were 
shaken. In the long struggle of the seventeenth century her close 
association with the Stuart cause left her powerless to touch the 
stronger half of the nation. She was not independent enough to 
act as arbiter, and in committing herself without reserve to oppo- 
sition to the national claim for freedom she was untrue to her 
earlier and better traditions. At the same time allowance must 
be made for the license, the disorder, and the recklessness with 
which the claims of liberty were associated, and for the identifica- 
tion of the popular party with views of religion which, whatever 
else may be said for them, are not those of the Church. The 
leading Churchmen believed that its triumph meant the disappear- 
ance of that historical Church which they rightly regarded as the 
only effective safeguard of English Christianity. After the Restor- 
ation the Church was stronger, and the increase of strength shows 
itself on the one side in greater independence of the Crown, and 
on the other in the outburst of numerous religious and charitable 
societies and foundations. Queen Anne's Bounty is an instance 
of the charity, if it be not rather the justice, of one distinguished 
daughter of the Church. The ' Religious Societies ' which in a 
quiet and unassuming way were a great influence in social life, 
had among their objects the visiting and relief of the poor, the 
apprenticing of the young, the maintenance of poor scholars at 
the University. Charity schools were established throughout the 
country : hospitals and parochial libraries founded, while societies 
like the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign 
Parts, and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge date 
back to the last years of the seventeenth and the first of the eigh- 
teenth centuries. 1 Then as the Georgian period begins, all this 
vigorous life seems for a long period to die down, or only to find 
vent in the great Wesleyan movement which, beginning within 
the Church, passes out beyond it, and ultimately becomes stereo- 
typed in more or less pronounced separation from her communion. 
It was the policy of the ruling Whig oligarchy to keep down the 
Church, and they succeeded, — to the grave loss of English moral- 
ity. If in some degree the Church in England at the present 
time is speaking with firmer accent on questions of personal and 
class morality, and giving more effective witness against the luxury 
and neglect of their work-people, which are the besetting sins of 

1 Overton, Life in the English Church, 1660-1714, ch. v. 



380 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

the great English manufacturing classes, it is due partly to the 
revival in England of the true idea of the Church as a great spirit- 
ual society, and partly to the fact that English statesmen, from 
sheer inability, owing to the conditions of political life to do other- 
wise, have left her more free to manage her own business and to 
develop her mission to the English people in accordance with the 
laws and aspirations of her own inner life. 

It is especially necessary in a great industrial society such as 
that of modern England that the Christian law of self-sacrifice, 
which crosses and modifies the purely competitive tendency lead- 
ing each individual to seek his own interest and that of his family, 
should be strongly and effectively presented. No doubt it is true 
that the increased knowledge of the structure and laws of social 
life which we possess, have made charity more difficult than in the 
Middle Ages ; they have not made it less necessary, or a less essen- 
tial feature of the Christian character. And so, in a democratic 
age, the protection of the weak and the oppressed will take a dif- 
ferent color. Whether supreme control is in the hands of one or 
many, it may be used tyrannically. And the most effective exercise 
of the tribunate of the Church will lie in guarding the rights of 
conscience and the great national interest of religion against hasty 
and unfair pressure. And this brings us to our next point. 

(3) The drift of the argument has been to show the incomplete- 
ness and inevitable limitations of the State, considered as a moral 
guide of the social life of mankind. But that incompleteness rises 
to its maximum, those limitations press most closely when we pass 
from morality to religion. If it is the highest duty of the State to 
maintain true and vital religion, 1 it is a duty which of itself it is alto- 
gether incompetent to perform. If the experience of the Middle 
Ages showed conclusively that the subordination of the State to 
the Church did not tend either to good government, or to the 
maintenance, pure and undefiled, of the Christian religion, the 
experience of English post- Reformation history has as conclusively 
shown that the subordination of the Church to the State leads on 
the one hand to the secularization of the Church, and on the 
other to a grave danger to national life, through the loss of a 
spiritual authority strong enough, as well as vigilant and indepen- 
dent enough, to reprove social sins and to call to account large 
and influential classes. The conditions under which the Tudor 
idea of a Christian commonwealth was possible have passed away, 

1 Hooker, Eccl. Pol., VIII. i. 4. In all commonwealths, things spiritual 
ought above temporal to be provided for. And of things spiritual, the 
chiefest is religion. Cp. V. i. 2. 



XI. Christianity and Politics, 381 

and there seem to remain two possible conclusions from the 
premises. 

The first is that it is expedient in the interests of both that 
Church and State should be separate from one another, as, e. g., 
in America, and left free to develop, each on its own lines, their 
respective missions in the national service, — ' a free Church in a 
free State.' The current of opinion in England in favor of disestab- 
lishment, undoubtedly a strong, though probably not at the present 
time an increasing one, is fed from many smaller streams. There 
are Agnostics, who believe that religion is the enemy of progress, 
and that Christianity especially shackles free thought, and hinders 
the advance of social reformation, and to whom therefore it seems 
a clear duty to undermine by every means open to them the hold 
of Christianity on the centres of social and intellectual life, on 
schools and universities, families and states. They favor disestab- 
lishment as one means to this end. Two principal causes seem to 
move those who are primarily statesmen in the direction of dis- 
establishment. One is the conception of the State as the great 
controlling and guiding organization of human life, 1 supreme over 
all partial societies and voluntary associations formed to guard 
parts or sides of life, and the attempt to mould national life by 
this guiding idea and its logical consequences. This attempt is 
encouraged by the extreme simplicity of the English Constitution 
in its actual working, and by the legally unlimited power of Parlia- 
ment. 2 The other is their 'practical experience that in view of 
the divided condition of English Christianity, the most stubborn 
and intractable difficulties in legislation arise from, or are aggra- 
vated by, religious differences. They suppose that these would 
be lessened if the State took the position of impartial arbiter 
between rival denominations. Among Nonconformists there are 
no doubt some who, looking at the Church as the natural rival of 
their own society, think to weaken her by disestablishment ; but 
there are also many who believe that disestablishment would be a 
gain to English religion, and that the life of the Church would be 
more real, more pure, more governed by the highest motives, if 

1 We have already shown reasons for thinking that though no doubt the 
State has a great co-ordinating and regulative function in regard to human 
life, it is not fitted for the part of the moral guide of mankind. 

2 Dice}', Law of the Constitution, second edition, 1886, lecture ii., p. 36. 
'The principle of Parliamentary sovereignty means neither more nor less 
than this, namely, that Parliament thus defined has, under the English Con- 
stitution, the right to make or unmake any law whatever ; and, further, that 
no person or body is recognized by the law of England as having a right to 
override or set aside the legislation of Parliament.' 



382 The Religion of the Incarnation, 

she were freed from all direct connection with the State. Lastly, 
there is no doubt that the idea of the return to the looser relations 
between Church and State which prevailed in the earliest Christian 
centuries, has a great attraction for a considerable body of Church- 
men. They would perhaps have been willing enough to accept 
the royal supremacy under a religious sovereign in thorough har- 
mony with the beliefs and modes of working of the Church, but 
the revolution by which the House of Commons has risen to 
supreme power in England, has given it, not in the theory, but in 
the actual working of the constitution, the ultimate control over 
matters ecclesiastical as well as civil, and they hold that by stifling 
the free utterance of the voice of the Church the House of Com- 
mons is doing an injury to religion compared to which disestab- 
lishment would be a lesser evil. 

On the other hand, if we look beyond our own country, we 
have the opinion of the venerable Dr. Dollinger, reported by 
Dr. Liddon, that the disestablishment of the Church in England 
would be an injury to the cause of religion throughout Europe. 
And so weighty an opinion may well make us carefully scrutinize 
those difficulties and tendencies which make for disestablishment. 
It is no doubt true that from one point of view the idea of the 
Church as a great spiritual society seems to require her entire 
freedom to control her own development, and therefore the 
absence of all formal connection with the State. But there is 
nothing more deeply illogical and irrational, in any sense of 
logic in which it is near to life and therefore true, than the 
attempt to solve a great problem, spiritual, moral, political, social, 
by neglecting all its factors but one, even if it be the most 
important one. Nor does it follow that, because we recognize 
that in a certain condition of things, more harm than good will 
be done by a particular application of a truth which we accept, 
therefore we have ceased to hold that truth. It only shows that 
our ideal is complex. 

And so from another point of view the most perfect ordering of 
things would seem to be one in which Church and State were two 
parts of one whole, recognizing one another's functions and limits, 
and mutually supporting one another. Thus religion would be 
put in its true place as at once the foundation and the coping- 
stone of national life. And the State with all its administration 
would be given a distinctly Christian character. The difficulty in 
England is to maintain this point of view in connection with the 
increasingly non-religious (not necessarily anti-religious) coloring of 
the State, and of the fierce struggles of party government, which 



xi. Christianity and Politics. 383 

destroy the reverence which might otherwise attach to the State 
and its organs. As the State has become increasingly lay, its 
moral weight has sunk, its hold on consciences become less. But 
"the truth remains that religion is an element in the highest national 
life. * A national Church alone can consecrate the whole life of 
a people.' 1 And a national Church can only mean an established 
Church, and a Church which either has great inherited wealth of 
its own, or is supported in part by national funds. ' Of all parts 
of this subject,' says Mr. Gladstone, 2 ' probably none have been 
so thoroughly wrought out as the insufficiency of the voluntary 
principle.' It is insufficient (7. <?., for maintaining national religion), 
first, because after a certain level of moral deterioration has been 
reached by individuals or masses of people, the demand for 
religion is least where the want is greatest ; and secondly, because 
in consequence of the structure of social life there are always large 
classes of the community who, while just provided with the bare 
necessaries of life, have not sufficient means to enable them to 
sustain the expense of the organs of the higher life in any form. 
We recognize this in the case of education ; we can hardly refuse 
to recognize it in the case of religion. 

• For these reasons we are thrown back on the second possible 
conclusion from the data, viz., that it is desirable that there should 
. be some definite and permanent connection between Church and 
State, but not such connection as will either subordinate the State 
to the Church, or the Church to the State. And such a result 
would seem to be best attainable by some such system of relations 
as that between the Established Church and the State in Scotland, 
or the Roman Catholic Church and the State in France. Thus in 
Scotland, on the critical point of jurisdiction, the position is this. 
The Church Courts are final ; there is no appeal to a Civil Court 
except on the ground of excess of jurisdiction. And the judgment 
of the Church Courts, so far as it involves civil consequences, may 
be enforced by application to the Civil Courts. 3 In France we 

1 Westcott, Social Aspects of Christianity, ch. v. p. 76. 

2 The State in its Relations with the Church, p. 41. 

3 Report of the Ecclesiastical Courts Commission, ii."6oi. Answers to 
questions, — Scotland, Established Church. 

' No appeal lies to a Civil Court in matters of discipline or on the ground 
of excess of punishment. But if under the form of discipline the Church 
Courts were to inflict Church censures (involving civil consequences) on a 
minister for e. g. obeying the law of the land, a question . . . might be 
brought before the Civil Court on the ground of excess of jurisdiction. It is 
believed that in no case would the Civil Court entertain an appeal from a 
judgment of an Ecclesiastical Court on a question of doctrine, or enter on an 



384 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

have to distinguish the relations of Church and State as constitu- 
tionally defined from those relations in their actual working. No 
constitutional relations, however admirable, can work when the 
State constantly encroaches, and where its whole attitude is one of 
hostility to the Church. In theory, however, the position in France 
is, except on one point, much the same as in Scotland. There is 
a complete system of ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the Roman Cath- 
olic Church based on the Canon Law and administered by the 
bishops acting as judges. From their decisions there is no appeal 
to the Civil Courts except on the ground of abuse (afipel d'abus). 
On the other hand, the Ecclesiastical Courts have no coercive jur- 
isdiction, nor are their sentences carried out by the Civil Courts. 1 
They bind, therefore, only in foro conscientice, and this is found 
sufficient. There is one point worthy of special notice in the 
French system, that while the relations of the State to the Roman 
Catholic (once the Gallican) Church are regulated by a special 
Concordat, two leading Protestant bodies, the French Reformed 
Church and the Church of the Augsburg Confession, as well as 
the Jewish body, are also endowed. Alongside of a system by 
which the Church is established there is a concurrent endowment 
of other Christian and even non-Christian denominations. 

In Scotland the relations of Church and State rest on the Act of 
Union, in France on the Concordat made by Napoleon with the 
Pope in 1 80 1. In England there is no definite formulated agree- 
ment ; and any such agreement would be entirely contrary to the 
English genius. But in a deeper sense, there is a contract, which 
is the product of 1200 years of history, of which the terms vary 
from generation to generation, and which is commended by each 
age to the forbearance and the statesmanship of its successors. 

examination of the soundness of such a judgment before enforcing its civil 
consequences. 

' Any questions which have arisen on points of ritual . . . have hitherto 
been decided exclusively by the Church Courts.' (A qualifying sentence 
follows as to possible extreme cases justifying, on the failure to obtain re- 
dress from the General Assembly, an appeal to the Civil Court.) 

1 Report of the Ecclesiastical Courts Commission, ii. 605. Answers to 
ques Lions, — France. 

' The State remains lay, and does not interpose, except when the acts of 
the clergy are offences at Common Law, or when there is a cas cfabus in which 
either the public order or individual interests are injured. In which case 
the Council of State is summoned at the instance of the Government, or on 
the complaint of the citizens, to repress abuses and annul the acts of abuse 
(actes d'afois) on the part of the clergy. 

' To recapitulate, the minister, as citizen, has to submit to the Common 
Law ; as priest, he belongs entirely to the jurisdiction of the Church, with 
which the State does not interfere, and with which it has not to interfere, 
for it is solely in the domain of conscience.' 






xi. Christianity and Politics. 385 

The terms of that contract are in the main fixed by the State. In 
any case, whether the Church remains established or not, the State 
has ultimate power over her temporal possessions, as over all tem- 
poral possessions held within its territory. But if the Church is to 
remain connected with the State, perpetual difficulties must arise, 
unless means are found to leave the Church free, in matters as 
well of doctrine as of ritual, both to legislate through her own or- 
gans, and to exercise an independent spiritual jurisdiction. It is 
for the interest of the State that the Church should be allowed to 
make her service for the English nation as fruitful, as powerful, and 
as little a hindrance to her own spirituality as possible. 

III. Lastly, we may consider the way in which the Church, 
quite irrespective of any direct connection with the State, as a nat- 
ural consequence of its position as a spiritual society and of its 
teaching as to fundamental moral and spiritual truths, acts as a 
purifying and elevating agent on the general social life of mankind, 
on all its manifestations and organs. 

If man is ' metaphysical nolens volens, it is equally true that he 
is metapolitical, to use Martensen's happy word, nolens volens. 
And metapolitic means ' that which precedes the political as its 
presupposition, that which lies outside and beyond it as its aim and 
object, and by which the political element is to be pervaded as by its 
soul, its intellectually vivifying principle. 1 Every statesman, every 
real leader of men, has, consciously or unconsciously, such a meta- 
politic ; he holds, that is, certain views as to man's place in the 
world, as to the meaning and possibility of progress, as to the aims 
as distinct from the machinery of government, as to the relations of 
nations to one another and to humanity, which determine his gen- 
eral attitude towards all kinds of questions with which he has to 
deal. It is clear, for instance, that the groups of ideas which gov- 
ern the fatalist, the pessimist, and the humanitarian, are widely 
different. 

Now the Church is the home and dwelling-place of certain great 
regulative ideas as to man's destiny and function, and his relation 
to God and other men, the treasure-house to which they were com- 
mitted, or the soil in which they germinated. These ideas, if 
accepted and acted on, or so far as accepted and acted on, must 
transform and remodel, not only the inward life, but also the whole 
outward life in all its spheres. Thus St. Paul deduces from the 
Christian conception of man the duties of husbands, wives, fathers, 
children, masters, servants, subjects, rich persons, old men, old 

1 Martensen, Christian Ethics, special part, second division, English 
Translation, p. 100. 

25 



386 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

women, young men, young women. And so, now rapidly, now 
slowly, according to the vigor and purity at successive periods of the 
Christian society, now thrown inwards by periods of persecution or 
by the rising tide of evil, now borne outwards in periods of rapid 
expansion and missionary enterprise, now brought to bear on new 
conditions of life and new social groupings, now traced back to 
their source, and tested by the life and words of the Word of God, 
the Christian ideas of man, and of his relation to God, radiate 
through the life of mankind, at once sustaining and correcting its 
aspirations and its ideals of righteousness. 

The root ideas of this Christian anthropology rest on the Chris- 
tian conception of God as one yet threefold. Thus on the one 
side, Christianity attaches to the individual personality a supreme 
and infinite value as the inmost nature of one made in the image 
of God, redeemed by the self-sacrifice of Christ, and indwelt by 
the Spirit of God. And thus it develops the sense of separate per- 
sonal responsibility. It is on this basis that what is true in human- 
itarianism rests. Behind all class and social differences lies the 
human personality in virtue of which all men are equal. 1 But on 
the other side it frankly recognizes man's inherently social nature. 
It is not good for man to be alone. And family, State, and the 
Church on earth are training places for a perfected common life in 
the City of God. 

The effect of this conception of man and his destiny is to place 
the State and its associations in their true position as not ultimate, 
but secondary, as means, and not ends. Alongside of the earthly 
kingdom, with its wealth, its honors, its ambitions, its wide and far- 
reaching influence, it sets another kingdom, the City of God, with 
its own standards, its own principles, its own glory, its own blessed- 
ness, as the end of mankind, the goal of history. ' The nations 
shall walk amidst the light thereof, and the kings of the earth do 
bring their glory into it.' 2 And, in so doing, it judges and corrects 
the splendor of earthly States. 

In thus contrasting the earthly State with the City of God, Chris- 
tianity is no doubt exposed to the old accusation, that it makes 
men bad citizens. And the old answer is still true, ' let those who 
think that the doctrine of Jesus Christ cannot contribute to the hap- 
piness of the State, give us soldiers and officers such as it bids them 
to be, subjects and citizens as faithful as Jesus Christ commands, 
husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, children, masters, servants, kings, 

1 Cp. Aug., de Civ. Dei, v. 24, of Christian Emperors, 'we think them 
happy if they remember themselves to be men.' 
* Rev. xxi. 24 (R. V.). 



xi. Christianity and Politics. 387 

judges, living according to the laws of religion, men as punctual in 
their payment of taxes, as pure in their handling of public funds as 
are the true Christians : they will be soon forced to admit that the 
maxims of the Gospel when practised cannot but give a State great 
happiness and great prosperity.' x It is not too much, but too little 
Christianity which destroys States ; for passion and wilfulness are 
the great disintegrating forces of the world, and everything which 
strengthens individuals to resist them, so far strengthens the bonds 
of social union. But the service which Christianity renders to 
States goes far beyond this negative result. If the true meaning of 
progress be moral, and not material, there can be no greater con- 
tribution to the well-being of society than that of maintaining the 
Christian type of character with its humility, its purity, its sincerity, 
and again its strong and beneficent activity. 

In the present discussion the State has been put first, and the 
Church second. In order of time the State is first. And what 
has been attempted has been to show how starting with the State 
and its institutions, the higher order which was initiated by the 
historical Incarnation (though not without preparatory and imper- 
fect anticipations in earlier and especially in Jewish history), comes 
in to mould, to purify, and to supplement. But these words only 
express partial aspects of the whole process by which a higher 
order acts on a lower. It interpenetrates far more deeply than 
can be expressed in any classification of the modes of its opera- 
tion. The Christian religion has been acting on the group of 
States which we call Christendom from the first days when stable 
organizations formed themselves after the entrance of the new life 
of the Germanic races into the remains of the dying Roman 
Empire. It has been the strongest of all the influences that have 
moulded them throughout their history. It has pierced and pene- 
trated the life of individuals, the life of families, the life of guilds, 
as well as the laws and institutions, the writings and works of art 
in which they have embodied their thoughts and hopes. They are 
in a sense its children. It is impossible to regard them as St. 
Augustine regarded pagan Rome. But deep and penetrating as 
has been her influence and manifold her consequent implications 
with the existing national and social life of mankind, the Church 
is essentially Catholic, and only incidentally national. It is their 
Catholic character so far as it remains, at least their Catholic ideal, 
which gives to the different fragments of the Church their strength 
and power. The ' Church of England ' is a peculiarly misleading 
term. The Church of Christ in England is, as Coleridge pointed 
1 Aug., Ep. ad Marcellinum, 138, 15. 



388 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

out, the safer and truer phrase. And this fundamental Catholicism, 
this correspondence not to one or another nation, but to humanity, 
rests on the appeal to deeper and more permanent needs than 
those on which the State rests. It is thus that the true type of the 
Church is rather in the family than in the State, because the family 
is the primitive unit of organized social life. Not in the order of 
time, but in the order of reason, the Church is prior to the State, 
for man is at once inherently social and inherently religious. And 
therefore it is only in the Church that he can be all that it is his 
true nature to be. 



XII. 

CHRISTIAN ETHICS. 



ROBERT OTTLEY. 



XII. 
CHRISTIAN ETHICS. 

The study of early Church History suggests the conclusion that 
the Christian religion was recognized as a rule, or fashion of life, 
before it was discovered to be a philosophy and a creed. To be 
complete, therefore, any account of Christianity must include the 
presentation of it as a Divine 'way of life,' — a coherent system 
of practical ethics, marked by characteristic conceptions of free- 
dom, duty, the moral standard, the highest end of life, and the 
conditions of human perfection. Such is the task we are about to 
attempt. To the necessary limitations of a sketch in outline, the 
reader may ascribe a general avoidance of controversial, and a 
preference for positive, statements ; as also the fact that some large 
and interesting branches of the subject are dismissed with no more 
than a passing allusion. 

It may be admitted, at the outset, that non-religious ethical 
speculation has in a measure paved the way for a re-statement of 
the Christian theory, by its inquiries into the source and nature — 
the rational basis and binding force — of moral obligation. For it 
may be maintained that in Christianity, rightly understood, is to be 
found an adequate answer to the question which all schools of 
thought agree in regarding as fundamental, — the question ' Why 
must I do right?' 

On the other hand, the Christian Church claims to meet the 
plain needs of average human nature by her answer to the ques- 
tion, \How am I to do right ? ' She claims to have at command 
practical means of solving a problem which is admittedly aban- 
doned as hopeless by the ethics of naturalism. If Jesus Christ 
gave profound extension to the ideas of duty and obligation, He 
was also the first Who pointed humanity to the unfailing source of 
moral power. In this respect Christianity presents a favorable 
contrast to other systems, the tendency of which is to be so con- 
cerned with the Ideal as to underrate the importance and pressure 
of the Actual. Christianity claims to be in contact with facts, — 



392 The Religion of the Incarnation: 

such facts as sin, moral impotence, perverted will, the tyranny of 
habit. And while she is large-hearted and eagle-spirited in her 
scope, — dealing with all possible relationships in which a human 
being may stand, whether to God above him, his fellow-men 
about him, or the sum of physical life below him, — the Church is 
none the less definite and practical in method and aim \ witness 
the importance she attaches to the individual character, the re-crea- 
tion of which is at least a step towards a regeneration of society. 

The chief point of distinction, however, between Christian and 
non- Christian ethics is to be found in a difference of view as to the 
relation existing between morality and religion. A system which so 
closely connects the idea of Good with the doctrine of God, must 
needs at every point present conduct as inseparably related to truth, 
and character to creed. It has been noticed indeed that Pliny's 
letter to Trajan — the earliest record we possess of the impression 
produced on an intelligent Pagan by the new religion — testifies to 
the intimate connection of morals with dogma and worship. What 
the Christian consciousness accepted as truth for the intellect, it 
embraced also as law for the will. Whether, then, we have regard 
to the practical purpose, or the wide outlook of the Christian 
system, we shall feel the difficulty of giving even a fair outline of 
so vast a subject in so limited a space. If the idea of Good cor- 
responds in any sense to the conception of God, that idea must 
have an infinite depth of significance, and range of application. 
If the re-creation of human nature be a practicable aim, no depart- 
ment of anthropology or psychology can be without its interest for 
ethics. It must suffice to indicate, rather than unfold, the points 
which seem to be of primary importance. 

Christian Morals are based on dogmatic postulates. The founda- 
tion of our science is laid, not merely in the study of*man's nature, 
his functions and capacities, but in revealed truths as to the nature 
and character of God, His creative purpose, His requirement of 
His creatures. We believe that Christ came to liberate human 
thought from systems of morality having their centre or source in 



man. 1 



' Man is not God, but hath God's end to serve ; 
A Master to obey, a course to take, ' ,y 

Somewhat to cast off, somewhat to become. . . . ^y* 
How could man have progression otherwise ?' fer , : 

The postulates may conveniently be distributed under three main 
heads, — the doctrine of God, of Man, of Christ. 

1 I St. Pet. i. 21 : #<rre rty ttictiv vfiuv ical i\irlda sivcu els 6s6v. 



xii. Christian Ethics, 393 

For the purpose of ethics, two simple truths as to the Being of 
God require attention. 

God is an Infinite, but Personal Being, existing from eternity in 
the completeness of His own blessedness, yet willing to become the 
centre of a realm of personalities. To this end He called into 
existence a world of personal beings, in a sense independent of 
Himself, but destined, in communion and intercourse with Him- 
self, to find and fulfil the law of their creaturely perfection. To 
these free and rational beings, Almighty God deigns to stand in 
self-imposed relations. 

Again, God is an Ethical Being ; He is essentially Holy and 
Loving. 

He is Holy, and appoints that for the entire realm of person- 
ality, as for Himself, holiness should be the absolute law. He 
alone can communicate to His creatures the idea of holiness ; of a 
supreme, eternal, ethical Good. The Good exists only in Him, 
is the essential expression of His Nature, the reflected light of 
His Personality. The idea of ethical Good is not therefore due 
to a natural process by which the accumulated social traditions of 
our race are invested with the name, and sanction, of moral Law. 
The idea is communicated, derived from the living Source of Good 
freely acting on the faculties of intelligent creatures who are capa- 
ble of receiving such communications ' in divers parts and in divers 
manners.' 1 

The apprehension of moral Law thus appears to correspond with 
a progressive apprehension of God. Along with the idea of the 
unity and absoluteness of God, heathendom lost the sense of an 
absolute moral Law ; 2 and conversely, in proportion as the Divine 
Nature manifests Itself more fully to human intelligence, the idea 
of moral Good gains expansion and depth. 

God is also Love : a truth which as it helps our thought to a 
more profound and consistent view of His mysterious Being, so 
implies that God must needs will His rational creature to be what 
He Himself is, ' holy and blameless before Him ; ' 3 to engage itself 
in activities resembling His own ; to be free with His Freedom, 
enlightened by His Light. 4 Nor can we think that Divine Love is 
content with a bare revelation of moral requirement. We believe 
that what God requires, He is ready and able to impart ; He will 
empower man to render what His righteousness exacts. Finally, 
if His purpose for man be interrupted or thwarted, He will ' devise 
means ' for its final and victorious fulfilment. He, the Author of 

1 Heb. i. 1. 2 See Dorner, Syst. of Christian Ethics, § 35. 

3 Eph. i. 4. * Cp. Plato, Tim., xxix. E. 



394 The Religion of the Incarnation, 

Creation, will in due time provide for a re-creation, not less potent 
and complete in its effects than the evil power which has invaded 
and marred the first creation. 1 For we can form no idea of Love 
other than that of an active, energizing principle by which a per- 
sonal Being reveals Himself; a Being tenacious of His purpose, 
multiform in His expedients, supremely patient in His beneficent 
activity. The God presupposed in Christian' Ethics is One Who 
displays holiness combined with power, love controlled by wisdom j 
in a word, He is the God of redemptive history. Thus morality 
finds its starting-point in theology. 2 

The Christian account of Man next engages attention. We con- 
fine ourselves to an inquiry into three points : What is man's essen- 
tial nature, his ideal destiny, his present condition ? 

We have already observed that in Christian Ethics man is not the 
central object of study. The moral universe tends towards a more 
comprehensive end than the perfection of humanity. Nevertheless, 
Christianity is specially marked by a particular conception of man. 
Regarding him as a being destined for union with, capable of like- 
ness to, God, she offers an account of man's failure to fulfil his true 
destiny, and witnesses to a Divine remedy for his present con- 
dition. The familiar contrast between humanity as it might be- 
come, and as it is, gives significance to the peculiarly Christian 
doctrine of sin. It is the dignity of the sufferer that makes the 
mischief so ruinous ; it is the greatness of the issue at stake that 
makes a Divine movement towards man for his recovery at once 
credible, and worthy of God. 3 

First, then, we presuppose a certain view of man's nature. 
Christianity lays stress on the principle of personality, with its de- 
termining elements, will and self-consciousness. It is for psychol- 
ogy to accurately define personality. For ethics it is simply an 
ultimate, all-important fact. It is that element in man which 
makes him morally akin to God, and capable of holding commu- 
nion with Him ; that which places him in conscious relation to 
Law ; gives him a representative character as God's vicegerent on 
earth, and conveys the right to dominion over physical nature. If 
religion consists in personal relations between man and God, reli- 
gious ethics must be concerned with the right culture and develop- 
ment of personality. 

1 Athan., de Incarn., x. 

2 Clem. Alex., Quis Dives, etc., vii. : apxh Ka\ KprjTrls (coris, eiriorr 7)1x7) 6eov, 
rod ovtws ovtos . . . 7) [lev yap rotirov &yvoia ddvarSs itrriv, t) Se eirlyvooffis 
avrov iced oIkgIoxtis, Ka\ irphs avrbv dydirrj teal e^o/jLolcaais, fiovT) far). 

3 Aug., de moribus Eccl., xii. 






xii. Christian Ethics. 395 

But in virtue of his creaturely position, man's personality cannot 
be an end to itself. 1 The tendency of Greek thought was to re- 
gard man as a self-centred being ; to look for the springs of moral 
action, and the power of progress, within human nature itself. 
Thus Aristotle's ideal is the self-development of the individual 
under the guidance of reason, and in accordance with the law of 
his being. The question is, what is this law, and what the ground 
of its obligation ? Personality, we answer, marked man from the 
first as a being destined for communion with, and free imitation of, 
God. 2 Personality enables man to be receptive of a message and 
a call from God. It confers on each possessor of it an absolute 
dignity and worth. Personality, — here is our crucial fact, ena- 
bling us to take a just measure of man, and of our duty towards 
him. One of the deepest truths brought to light by the Gospel 
was the value of the personal life, of the single soul, in God's sight. 
Man is great, not merely because he thinks, and can recognize 
moral relationships and obligations ; but chiefly because he was 
created for union with God ; and was destined to find blessedness 
and perfection in Him alone. Christianity therefore rates highly 
the worth of the individual ; and her task is to develop each human 
personality, to bring each into contact with the Personality of God. 3 

For, secondly, man has an ideal destiny, 4 — life in union with 
God, a destiny which, as it cannot be realized under present con- 
ditions of existence, postulates the further truth of personal immor- 
tality. 5 Man is capable of progressive assimilation to God, of ever 
deeper spiritual affinity to Him. 6 Such must be the ideal end of a 
being of whom it is revealed that he was made ' in the ima^e of 
God.' 

But the thought of the ' Divine image ' leads us a step further. 
Whatever be the precise import of the expression, it at east implies 
that the Good, which is the essence of the Divine, is also a vital 
element in the perfection of Human nature. It remains to indi- 
cate the way in which man is capable of recognizing Good as the 
law of his being, and embodying it in a character. Christianity, as 
a moral system, offers an account of conscience and of freedom. 

1 Athan., cont. Gentes, iii., describes the aversion of man from God as be- 
ginning in ' self-contemplation ' {eavrovs Karavoelv Tjp^avro). 

2 Ath., c. Gent., ii. 

3 Wace, Boyle Lectures, ser. 1, Lee. vii. Cp. Col. i. 28. 
2 Cor. v. 4, 5 : 6 KaTepyacra.fj.evos rifxas els avrb tovto 8e6s. 

5 Lactant, Div. Inst., iii. 12 : ' Haec vita praesens et corporalis beata 
esse non potest, quia malis est subjecta per corpus. ... Si cadit beatitude, 
ergo et imtnortalitas cadit in hominem, quae beata est.' 

6 Eph., v. 1. Ep., ad Diog., x. 



396 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

The Scriptural doctrine of conscience represents it as the faculty 
which places man in conscious relation to moral Law, as the ex- 
pression of the Divine nature and requirement. In a brief sketch 
it is enough to lay stress on two points. 

1. Conscience appears to be an original and constant principle 
in human nature. To assign to it a merely empirical origin, — to 
derive it from social evolution, from the circumstances, prevalent 
beliefs, traditional customs of a human community, — is inadequate, 
inasmuch as no such supposed origin will satisfactorily account for 
the authoritativeness, the spontaneity, the • categorical imperative ' 
of conscience. 1 Further, the functions attributed to this faculty in 
Scripture, — e. g., ' judging/ ' accusing,' ' witnessing,' ' legislating,' 
— all convey the idea that man stands in relation to moral Law as 
something outside, and independent of, himself, yet laying an 
unconditional claim on his will. In the Christian system the exist- 
ence of conscience in some form is regarded as a primary and 
universal fact. Its permanent character is everywhere the same ; 
its function, that of persistently witnessing to man that he stands in 
necessary relation to ethical Good. 

2. The language of the Bible throughout implies that conscience 
in its earliest stage is an imperfect organ, capable like other facul- 
ties of being cultivated and developed. Our Lord's reference to 
the inward ' eye ' (St. Matt. vi. 22) suggests a fruitful analogy in 
studying the growth of conscience. In its germ conscience is like 
an untrained sense, exercising itself on variable object-matter, and 
hence not uniform in the quality of its dictates. It is enough to 
point out that this fact is amply recognized by New Testament 
writers. St. Paul speaks more than once of progress in knowledge 
and perception as a feature of the Christian mind, and the faculty 
of discerning the Good is said to grow by exercising itself on 
concrete material. 2 So again, the moral faculty is impaired by 
unfaithfulness to its direction; the moral chaos in which the 
heathen world was finally plunged resulted from such unfaithful- 
ness on a wide scale. The Gentiles knew God, but did not act 
on their knowledge. They ' became darkened ; ' they lost the 
power of moral perception. 3 

To enlarge on this subject forms no part of our present plan. 
It is fair, however, to cordially acknowledge that Christian thought 
is indebted to psychological research for deeper and more accurate 

1 Bp. Butler's sermons emphasize this side of the doctrine of conscience, 
esp. the Preface. Cp. Flint, Theism, Lect. vii. 

2 See Phil. i. 9, and Heb. v. 14 (the Greek). 

3 Rom. i. 21 ; Athan., cont. Gentes, iii.-xi. 






xii. Christian Ethics, 397 

conceptions of the moral faculty ; and the possibility of large 
variation both in the dictates of conscience and the certainty of 
its guidance may be freely admitted. And yet it has been justly 
observed that the question of the origin of this faculty is not one 
with which ethics are primarily concerned. That inquiry is wholly 
distinct from the question of its capacities and functions when in a 
developed state} The unconditional claim of conscience, — this is 
the constant factor which meets us amid all variations of standard 
and condition. It is enough that conscience is that organ of the 
soul by which it apprehends moral truth, and is laid under obliga- 
tion to fulfil it. A Christian is content to describe it as God's 
voice ; or, in a poet's words : — 

' God's most intimate presence in the soul, 
And His most perfect image in the world/ 

For Conscience, while making an absolute claim on man's will, 
appeals to him as a being endowed with a power of choice ; and 
thus we pass to the subject of freedo7n. What is freedom, in the 
Christian sense? In the New Testament freedom is connected 
with, truth. ' The truth/ it is said, ' shall make you free.' If 
man stands in a real relation to the Good, his true freedom can 
only mean freedom to correspond with, and fulfil the law of, his 
nature. 2 The formal power of choice with which man is born, — 
a power which in fact is seen to be extremely limited, 3 — is only 
the rudimentary stage of freedom. Will is as yet subject to num- 
berless restrictions, such that they seem utterly to preclude an 
unfettered choice. It is limited, for example, by the influence of 
heredity to an extent which often appears to determine uncon- 
ditionally the choice between different courses of action. * Deter- 
minism ' has at least liberated our thinking from the crude idea of 
freedom as man's power ' to do as he likes.' True liberty can 
only mean freedom from false dependence, emancipation of the 
will from the undue pressure of external forces or inherited ten- 
dencies. The condition of ' perfect freedom ' is that in which 
man yields an unforced accord to the Good, — his correspondence 
with it as the law of life. And as his formal power of choice 
becomes by habit more and more determined towards a fixed 
adherence to the Good, he begins to taste the ' glorious liberty ' 

1 Wace, Boyle Lect., ser. I, Lect. ii. 

2 Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, I xii. : ' Libertas non est nisi ad hoc quod 
expedit aut quod decet.' 

3 See Martineau, Types of Eth. Theory, i. 93; ii. 39 [ed. 2] ; Holland, 
Creed and Character, Serm. x. 



398 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

of a right relation to God and His Law. He becomes free with 
the liberty which is ' freedom not to sin,' he finds himself ' under 
the sole rule of God most free.' 1 

Lastly, Christianity as a moral system is distinguished by her 
view of man's present condition. His upward development has 
been interrupted. In theological language he is a ' fallen ' being, 
and the path of ethical progress is a way of recovery? Man's 
capacity of corresponding with the ideal, of free self-conformity 
to it, though not destroyed, is at least 'seriously impaired. His 
spiritual capacities are not what they were once in a fair way to 
be ; they are weakened and depraved, and man's advance towards 
a free power of self-determination is in fact hindered by a radical 
defect of will, — in Christian language, by the principle of Sin. 
The Bible gives an account of sin, its first cause, its consequences 
in human history. Christian Ethics make allowance for this factor ; 
systems which overlook it or minimize it inevitably lose contact 
with the actual problem to be solved, with life as it is. Their 
tendency at best is to treat moral, as on a level with physical, evil ; 
as an obstruction, a hindrance, but not a vital defect inherent in 
human nature. Not such is the Christian view of sin. For sin 
conditions the work of the Incarnate Son Himself. Not only does 
Christ set Himself to re-erect the true standard of character, He 
devotes Himself also to dealing with the actual ravages of moral 
evil. He teaches its intrinsic nature, its source in the will, the 
inviolable law of its retribution ; He reveals the destructive potency 
of its effects ; He labors as the Good Physician to remove its tem* 
poral penalties ; He provides, in His atoning Sacrifice of Himself, 
the one and only countervailing remedy. 3 

Such postulates respecting the Nature of God and of Man find 
their complement and point of contact in the Catholic doctrine of 
the Incarnation. As to the Person of Christ, it is enough to pre- 
mise that the Christian system of ethics is intelligible only on the 
basis of a complete recognition of all that our Lord claimed to be. 
He came to reveal among men the nature, the ways, the will of 
the All-Holy j to present the true pattern of human goodness; to 



1 Aug., de mor. Eccl., xxi. : ' [Deo] solo dominante liberrimus/ Observe 
that as freedom grows, the choice becomes more restricted by the law : trivra 
e|e(TTij/, dA\' ov Tvavra (rv/n<pepei (i Cor. x. 23). Cp. Pet. Lomb., Sent., ii. 
xxv. 7. 

2 Cyp., de Op. et Eleem., i. : ' Pater Filium misit ut reparare nos posset.' 
Such language is usual with the Fathers. 

3 The whole subject of sin, guilt, punishment, is germane to our subject, 
but for present purposes must be left on one side. 



xii. Christian Ethics. 399 

be the perfect representative of man before God. 1 He is the 
Revealer of God, as being Himself in the fullest sense One with 
God ; He is the pattern of humanity in virtue of His sinless man- 
hood j the representative, through His organic union with our 
race. His Resurrection and Ascension together are the condition 
of His re-creative action as a quickening Spirit on the entire nature 
of man. In a word, His Person, His work, His character form 
the central point of ethical inquiry and contemplation.' 2 To arrive 
at the true differentia of Christian morals we need to study more 
profoundly the character and purpose of Jesus Christ. 



I. Christ's Revelation of the Highest Good. 

To the Christian moralist the entire universe presents itself in 
the light of a revealed purpose as capable of receiving a spiritual 
impress, and as moving towards an ethical consummation. For 
although man is the crown of the physical creation, he cannot be 
independent of it in his advance towards the proper perfection of 
his being. The destiny of nature is bound up with that of human- 
ity, in so far as nature tends towards some form of ethical con- 
sciousness, presents the material conditions of moral action, is 
capable of being appropriated or modified by moral forces, — will 
and personality. Thus an inquiry into the Highest Good for man 
gives to ethics a natural point of contact with metaphysics. 3 

Christ Himself points our thought to this ideal region by pre- 
senting to us as the Highest Good, as the ultimate object of moral 
effort, the ki7igdom of God. 4 A precise definition of this expression 
may be left to a formal treatise ; but a certain complexity in the 
idea may be briefly elucidated. 

In the first instance the kingdom of God is spoken of by our 
Lord as a Good to be appropriated by man, through conscious and 
disciplined moral effort. In this sense the kingdom is already 

1 Iren. Hi. 18, 7 [Stieren] : eSet yap rbv fxeo-iTyv Beov re Ka\ avdpiyirwv Sia, 
TTJs iStas trpbs enarepovs olKei6rr]Tos els <pi\lav Kal djxovoiav robs dficporepovs 
(rvvaywyeTv, Kal 0etp fxeu irapao-Trjcrai rbv &v6pwTrop, avQpwirois de yvup'urai rbv 
8e6v. 

2 Heb. in. 1 ; Cyp., de idol, van., xi. : ' Quod homo est, esse Christus voluit, 
ut et homo possit esse quod Christus est.' 

3 Bern., de Consid., v. 1 : ' Quid quod et inferioribus eges ? . . . Nonne 
praeposterum hoc et indignum ? Plane superiorum qusedam injuria est in- 
feriorum operam desiderare : a qua injuria nemo hominum perfecte vindi- 
cabitur nisi cum quisque evaserit in libertatem filiorum Dei.' 

4 St. Matt. vi. 33. 



400 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

' within ' men, 1 though not in its mature or perfected stage. It is 
an actual state, spiritual and moral, an inward process or move- 
ment, a present possession. The attainment of this state involves 
1 Blessedness,' — a word the true meaning of which is open to mis- 
conception. ' Blessedness ' is not 'a mere future existence of 
imaginary beatitude, ' 2 not a bare independence of natural neces- 
sities ; nor is it identical with, though it may include, ' happiness.' 
The instinct in human nature to which Christ appealed is more 
fundamental than the desire of ' happiness.' The word employed 
by Him to convey His meaning had by ancient usage been con- 
nected with supposed conditions and modes of the Divine existence. 
1 Blessedness ' in fact consists in a living relation to God, in a pro- 
gressive likeness to Him ; in its final stage it is nothing less than the 
possession of God. God is the Highest Good. 3 

The kingdom of God is also to be conceived as the goal of the 
entire movement of the universe ; but while nature tends blindly 
towards some ideal end, the history of mankind is the record of a 
Divinely directed movement carried on through free human agency. 4 
For an ethical world two factors are required : physical nature, the 
sphere of force and necessity; rational personality, conscious of 
freedom and of the claim of authority. The goal of the universe 
is therefore a kingdom in which each element, physical nature and 
personality, finds its appropriate sphere, the one subordinate, the 
other dominant. We discern a prophecy of this result in Bacon's 
great conception of a ' regnum hominis ' attainable by intelligent 
obedience to nature. The Bible is full of a greater thought. It 
foresees a kingdom of intelligent beings whose law is the service of 
God ; a state in which the inner harmony of man's restored nature 
will be reflected in a worthy outward environment. This ideal king- 
dom, however, has its preparatory stage on earth. Though the 
present condition of it only faintly foreshadows the promised glory 
of the future, it has nevertheless been in fact set up among men, 

i St. Luke xvii. 21 ; St. Matt. xiii. 45 foil. (Parable of the Pearl). Cp. Rom. 
xiv. 17: 7] jSatrtAeia rod 6eov . . . kanriv . . . diKaHxrvvr) Kcd elpijvr] Kal x a P& 
ev irvev/j.a.Ti ayiw. 

2 Wace, ubi sup., Lect. viii. Ambr., de Off. min., ii. 3, 4- # 

3 Aug., de mor. Eccl., xiii. * Bonorum summa Deus nobis est ; Deus est 
nobis summum bonum.' lb. xviii. : ' Secutio Dei, beatitatis appetitus est ; 
consecutio, ipsa beatitas.' 

* Thorn. Aquin., Summa, i. ii ae . Qu. i. 2 :' Ilia quae rationem habent seipsa 
movent ad finem, quia habent dominium suorum actuum per liberum arbi- 
trium. . . . Ilia vero qua? ratione carent tendunt in finem propter naturalem 
inclinationem quasi ab alio mota, non autem a seipsis, cum non cognoscant 
rationem finis ; et ideo nihil in finem ordinare possunt, sed solum in finem ab 
alio ordinantur.' 



xii. Christian Ethics. 401 

'not in word, but in power.' For the main factor that makes such 
a kingdom ideally possible, already operates, — namely, creaturely 
life realizing its true dependence on God, human will and human 
character responding to the will and purpose of God. 1 

Such is the kingdom for which we look, and its Centre and Head 
is the living Christ. 2 He is the type after which the new person- 
ality is to be fashioned. He who unveils this world of spiritual 
beings and powers, is Himself the source of its movement, the 
centre of its attraction, the surety of its final triumph. 

There cannot but result from this hope a particular view of the 
present world. It is characteristic of the Christian spirit frankly to 
recognize the natural world in its due subordination to personality, 
in its subserviency to ethical ends. An absolute idealism is not 
less alien to this standpoint than a crude materialism. The Chris- 
tian is not blind to the tokens of interdependence between the 
worlds of matter and spirit ; the fact indeed of such relation gives 
peculiar color to the Christian regard for nature. Nature is pre- 
cious as the sphere in which a Divine Life is manifested, as the 
object of Divine Love. 3 And yet, in the light of revelation, the 
universe cannot be contemplated without mingled emotions. The 
Christian knows something of the pain and of the satisfaction which 
in their unchastened form we call Pessimism and Optimism. For 
there must be sorrow in the recollection of the causal link that 
unites physical to moral evil. Though pain has value as the con- 
dition of nobler phases of life, and heightened spirituality of char- 
acter, it is nevertheless an evil producing in a healthy nature 
something more than a transient disturbance. Pain is the sensible, 
even if remote, outcome of moral perversity, of misdirected desire. 
It pervades impartially the physical universe, but seems in manifold 
instances to point beyond itself to its source in human sin. 

And yet there is a Christian optimism, — a thankful joy even 
amid present conditions. There is the joy of at least a rudiment- 
ary realization of the chief Good ; the joy of setting a seal, as it 
were, to the truth of God. 4 The ' powers of the world to come ' 
are already within reach ; they can be set in motion, felt, tested, 
enjoyed. There is a known end of creation by the light of which 
all forms and products of human enterprise can be judged. Thus 
even the growth and organized strength of evil does not dismay 
the Christian ; for he knows that the advance of the kingdom is 

1 See Godet, Comm. on i Corinthians [Clark] vi. 236. 

2 St. Matt. xix. 28 ; St. Luke xxii. 30. 

3 St. John iii. 16. 

* St. John iii. 33. See Dorner's System of Ethics [Clark], § 47. 
26 



402 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

certain, whatever be the hindrances opposed to it, and that God's 
invincible will controls and overrules all that seems most lawless, 
and hostile to His purpose. 'The city of God,' says St. Augustine, 
' is a pilgrim sojourning by faith among evil men, abiding patiently 
the day when righteousness shall turn to judgment, and victory 
bring peace.' In his assurance that 'all things work together for 
good to them that love God,' that the end is certain, and human 
fears are blind, the Christian can be free from illusions or extrava- 
gant hopes, yet not cast down, ' sorrowful, yet alway rejoicing,' 
' perplexed, but not in despair.' 1 

II. Christ's Revelation of the Moral Law, its authority, sanc- 
tions, and content. 

On the place and meaning of freedom in Christian Ethics we 
have already touched. Our formal freedom is the ground of moral 
responsibility, — that element in us to which Law makes its authori- 
tative appeal. From the thought of freedom in relation to a moral 
universe we pass naturally to that of Law. 

And first, it is convenient to inquire what is the revealed basis of 
obligation in general? 

The most conspicuous feature of the Sermon on the Mount — 
that first great outline of Christian morality — is its authoritative 
tone. We instinctively turn to it in searching for a fundamental 
principle of obligation, a ground of authority for Law. Nor are we 
disappointed, for our question is met by the consideration that this 
great discourse is primarily a revelation of the personal God in His 
holy relation to mankind. It is with this personal relationship that 
the claim of moral Good on man's will is seen to be uniformly con- 
nected. The Good in fact presents itself to man in the shape of a 
pe?sonal appeal : ' Be ye holy, for I am holy.' Morality appears as 
God's exhortation to man to embrace and fulfil the true law of his 
nature. ' Be ye perfect,' it is said, ' even as your Father which is 
in heaven is perfect.' 2 The Good is thus at once the explicit dec- 
laration of the Divine will and the condition of human perfection. 
Already the coldness of abstract Law begins to disappear. Law is 
seen to be not an abstraction merely, but inseparably connected 
with the living Personality behind it. It is the self-revelation of a 

1 2 Cor. iv. 8; vi. io. Cp. Rom. viii. 28. 

2 St. Matt. v. 48. Butler, Serm. 3 : ' Your obligation to obey this Law is 
its being the Law of your nature. . . . The correspondence of actions to the 
nature of the agent renders them natural/ 



xii. Christian Ethics,. 403 

loving Being, appealing to the object of His Love, and seeking its 
highest welfare. Obligation is transformed, and is seen to be the 
tie of vital relationship between persons. 1 

Further, it must be borne in mind that Christ's teaching as to 
obligation was accompanied by the promise of a supernatural gift, 
— the gift of a new capacity to fulfil the Law. The Good had 
hitherto been known, howsoever imperfectly, as requirement. 
Ethical progress before Christ's coming could only tend to deepen 
this knowledge. We know indeed what was the object of that 
long providential discipline of humanity which culminated in the 
Incarnation : how it ended by driving man to look and long for 
a condition of things which should no longer be marked by hope- 
less severance of the actual from the obligatory. With the advent 
of the Redeemer, a new joy dawned on the world, — the possibility 
of goodness. 

We learn then that the ground of obligation is God's will for the 
perfection of His creatures, — His desire that they should be like 
Himself. 2 The sense of obligation is indeed never absent from 
the consciousness of Christ Himself. 'We must work,' He says, 
' the works of Him that sent Me while it is day/' ' My meat is to 
do the will of Him that sent Me, and to finish His work/ 3 — in 
which utterances we discern the principle we need. Only when 
duty presents itself in the form of personal appeal, only when 
obedience is kindled and enriched by feeling, can law become a 
bond, not of constraint, but of love. 

It follows that obligation, thus founded on personal relationship 
to God, is absolute and independent of variation in the specific 
demands of Law. Human goodness will consist in correspond- 
ence to the will of God, and the degree of clearness with which a 
man apprehends that will is the measure of his obligation. This 
principle seems to preclude any idea of ' supererogatory works,' and 
tends to neutralize for the individual conscience the distinction 
between ' commands ' and ' counsels of perfection,' the spirit in 
which Law is ideally fulfilled being that of sonship, eager, loyal, 
and generous. 4 

1 Cp. Bp. Ellicott, The Being of God, p. 120. 

2 Rom. ii. 18 (yivdxTKeis rb 6e\rjfxa) implies that when a man knows God's 
will, he knows his duty. 

3 St. John ix. 4 ; iv. 34. Cp. vi. 40 ; St. Luke iv. 43. See also Rom. xii. 
2 ; Eph. v. 17, etc. 

4 The case of the young man (St. Matt. xix. 21) shows how obligation is 
extended by contact with Christ, i. e. by closer relation to God. The general 
principle is that each is bound to follow the law of his personal perfection 
as it unveils itself to him. See Bengel in loc, and cp. St. Luke xvii. 10. 



404 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

The universal obligation of moral Law is by Christ connected 
for practical purposes with a system of sanctions. As to the 
Christian doctrine of rewards and punishments it is only necessary 
to observe, that any ethical system which has regard to the condi- 
tion of man as he is, finds itself constrained, for disciplinary ends, 
to lay a certain stress on this point. Further, it should be noticed 
that the nature of these sanctions is seldom clearly understood. 
I They occupy a place in Christ's teaching, because it is His wont 
to deal with human nature as He finds it ; He points, however, 
not so much to a future state, as to a present spiritual sphere in 
which conduct is indissolubly linked to consequence, and there 
operate ' the searching laws of a spiritual kingdom.' x The sanc- 
tions with which Christ enforces His doctrine may thus be regarded 
as pointing to a reign of Law in the spiritual realm which He 
reveals to mankind. He seems indeed to recognize the occa- 
sional need of appeals to fear, as likely to rouse the conscience 
and will. He sets before us the prospect of spiritual judgments 
acting, at least partially, in the sphere of the present life. His 
more frequent appeal, however, is to what may be called the 
enlightened self-interest of men. Their true life, He tells them, 
is to be found or acquired in a consecration, a sacrifice of the 
natural life to the claims and calls of the Divine kingdom. 2 Such 
sacrifice, such co-operation with God, is its own ineffable reward. 

What then, it may be asked, are the motives, the inducements to 
action, appealed to by Christianity? how far are imperfect motives 
recognized ? and in view of the fact that no mere sense of relation 
to Law is in general likely to move the human will, where does 
the Gospel find its ' moral dynamic/ — its highest motive ? 

We have seen that Christianity in a peculiar degree combines 
the presentation of duty with an appeal to feeling. In the same 
way by connecting obligation to obey God with a revelation of His 
Love, Jesus Christ solves the most difficult problem of ethics. 
The highest motive is Love to God, kindled not only by the 
contemplation of His Perfections, but also by a passionate sense 
of what He has wrought in order to make possible the fulfilment 
of His Law. ' We love Him,' says St. John, ' because He first 

1 Wace, Lect. ii. 

2 St. Matt. xvi. 25, 26. The discussion of ' Christian consolations,' by 
Mr. Cotter Morison, ' Service of Man,' overlooks the fact that Christ's object 
was not to ' console ' men, but to set before them the truth, and the law of 
their own perfection. The ' consolations ' of Christianity can be won only 
if they are never made the object of life. They are a rezuard, but never, in 
the higher forms of Christian consciousness, an aim. See Church Quart. 
Rev., Jan. 1888, p. 268. 



xii. Christian Ethics. 405 

loved us.' We do not, however, expect the motive of action to 
be in all cases identical, or uniformly praiseworthy. A practical 
system must recognize very different stages of maturity in charac- 
ter ; and the possibility of imperfect or mixed motives is frankly 
allowed by Christian thinkers, and seems to be sanctioned by our 
Lord Himself. 1 It may be said on the whole that while the Gospel 
ever appeals to man's desire for his own good, it adapts itself and 
condescends to widely varying forms and degrees of that desire, 
by way of educating it to greater disinterestedness and purity. 2 
We may fittingly speak of ' a hierarchy of motives,' and can view 
with equanimity those attacks on Christianity which represent it as 
a thinly-disguised appeal to selfishness. For the reward promised 
to man is one which will only appeal to hiui in so far as he has 
parted with his old self, and has made the Divine purpose his own. 
The reward is joy, — the 'joy of the Lord;' the joy of a worthy 
cause embraced and advanced ; of a task achieved ; of labor 
crowned by nobler and wider service. Such joy could only be an 
inspiring motive to self-forgetful love, which finds the fulfilment of 
every aspiration, the satisfaction of every desire, in God and in His 
work. 3 

Christian duty, the content of the Law, demands somewhat 
larger treatment. It has been suggested that the conception of 
morality as a Divine code, as ' the positive law of a theocratic 
community,' which seems characteristic of early Christian writings 
on morals, is a legacy from Judaism. 4 Be tins as it may, — the 
distinctive feature of Christianity is that henceforth the Law is not 
contemplated apart from the Personality of God. The Law is 
' holy, just, and good,' because it reflects His character. Obedi- 
ence to it is acknowledged to be the indispensable condition of 
true union between God and His creatures. For Jesus Christ 
teaches us to discern in the Law the self-unveiling of a Being 
whose holiness and love it reflects, as well as His purpose for 
man. 

The revealed Law is comprised in the Decalogue. It seems 

1 Witness the discussions on fear commonly found in mediaeval theology. 
Bruce, ' Parabolic Teaching of Christ,' p. 359 foil., has some good remarks on 
this point. ' The parabolic form of instruction does not afford scope for the 
play of the highest class of motives. It is essentially popular wisdom, and 
it is the way of that which aims at teaching the million, to make action 
spring from homely motives. , 

2 Butler, Analogy, i. 5. 

3 See H. S. Holland, Creed and Character, Serm. xviii. Cp. St. Matt, 
xxv. 21, Heb. xii. 2. Thomas Aquin., Summa, ii. ii ffi , xxviii. 

4 Sidgwick, Outlines of the Hist, of Ethics, chap. 3. 



406 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

needless to vindicate at length the paramount place which this 
fundamental code occupies in Christian thought. 1 Suffice it to 
say, that in broad outline it defines the conditions of a right rela- 
tion to God, and to all that He has made. And the Law is 
• spiritual.' 2 Though for educative purposes primarily concerned 
with action, it makes reference to inward disposition, and thereby 
anticipates the main characteristic of Christian goodness. It also 
recalls the great land-marks of God's redemptive action; it sets 
forth His gracious acts, partly as an incentive to gratitude, partly 
as a ground of obligation. 

In our Lord's teaching we find two truths implied: (i) The 
absolute priority and permanence of the Decalogue in relation 
to all other precepts of the Jewish Law; (2) Its essential unity 
viewed as a Law of love. This latter aspect is anticipated in 
the book of Deuteronomy, and is explicitly set forth by our 
Lord. There are, He tells us, two commandments : the first and 
greatest, love to God ; the second ' like unto it,' love to man, 
with the limitation annexed, ' Thou shalt love thy neighbor as 
thyself.' 

Thus guided by precedent, a Christian, in examining the Law's 
content, may take the Decalogue as a natural basis of division. It 
may be shortly analyzed as embracing a comprehensive outline of 
man's duty towards (i) God, (ii) his fellow-men, and implicitly 
towards himself and non-personal creatures. 

First stand duties towards God, resulting directly from the per- 
sonal contact assumed to be possible between God and man. The 
all-embracing command which involves the fulfilling of the Law is 
contained in the words, - Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with 
all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.' 3 In 
this ' great commandment ' we find the widest point of divergence 
from Pagan ethics. Man's true centre is God. His perfection is 
to be sought in creaturely subjection and free conformity to the 
Divine purpose. 4 The general sphere of God-ward duty is defined 
in the first four commandments, which are seen to give moral 
sanction, not only to the outward expression, but to the actual 

1 Iren. iv. 16, § 3 [Stieren]. God appears in the Decalogue 'praestruens 
hominem in suara amicitiam . . . et ideo [verba] similiter permanent apud 
nos extensionem et augmentum sed non dissolutionem accipientia per carna- 
lem Eius adventum.' Thorn. Aquin., Summa, i. i®. Qu. c. Art. 3 : | Omnia 
praecepta [moralia] legis sunt quaedam partes praeceptorum decalogi.' 

2 Rom. vii. 14. 

3 St. Matt. xxii. 37. Cp. Aug., de mor. Eccl. xviii.-xx. ; de doc. Christ., i. 
29. 

4 Aug. 1. c : ' Maxime Ei propinquat [homo] subjectione ista qua similis fit.' 






xii. Christia,7t Ethics. 407 

substance of belief; the distinctive duties enjoined therein have 
been summarily described as faith, reverence, service. 1 The fourth 
precept lays down the principle that man is bound to honor God 
by consecrating a definite portion of time to His worship, and by 
providing space for the due re-creation of that human nature which 
by creative right is God's, and is destined for union with Him. 

The duty of love to our fellow-men follows upon that of love to 
God. Every man's personality gives him absolute and equal worth 
in God's sight, and therefore lays us under obligation towards Him. 
Heathen moralists confined the sphere of obligation to a few simple 
relationships, e. g., family-life, friendship, civic duty. But the re- 
vealed law of love to man embraces every relationship. ' Every 
man is neighbor to every man.' 2 It is clear that any adequate out- 
line of this precept involves the whole treatment of social duty. 

Men have their rights, i. e. lay us under obligation, both individ- 
ually and collectively. The individual has his ' duty ' to fulfil to 
the family, the association, the class, the city, the State, the Church 
which claims him. The immense field of our possible duties 
towards society, and towards each individual, so far as he comes 
in contact with us, may be regarded as embraced in the second 
table of the Decalogue. Thus the fifth commandment lends im- 
portant sanction not only to the parental claim, but also to the 
authority of fundamental moral communities, — the family, the 
State, the Church. The following precepts regulate the security of 
life and personality, of marriage and sexual distinctions, of property, 
honor, and good name. The tenth commandment anticipates 
that < inwardness ' which constitutes the special feature of Chris- 
tian morality. * It is the commandment,' says an ethical writer, 
< which perhaps beyond any of the rest was likely to deepen in the 
hearts of devout and thoughtful men in the old Jewish times, that 
sense of their inability to do the will of God, and to fulfil the 
Divine idea of what human life ought to be, which is indispensable 
to the surrender of the soul to God.' 3 

But according to the Christian theory there are duties to self, 
which seem to follow from the relation in which man stands to 
God, and form the true measure of his regard for others : ' Thou 
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself There is a right self-love, a 
right care of the personality as being itself an object of God's Love, 

1 Thorn. Aquin., Summa, i. ii.ae c . 5 : ' Principi communitatis tria debet homo, 
fidehtatem, reventiam, famulatum.' Cp. Butler, Analogy, pt. ii. i. 

3 d u §-' de iJ isc - Christ, iii. • < Proximus est omni homini omnis homo,' etc. 
K. W. Dale, The Ten Commandments, p. 241. Cp. Thorn. Aquin , 
Summa, i. ii^. c . 6 ; Martineau, Types, etc., ii. 26. 



408 The Religion of the Incarnation, 

and so included in the category of things ethically good. What 
the Christian ought to love, however, is not the old natural self, 
but the ' new man,' the true image of himself which has absolute 
worth. 1 A moral complexion is thus given to all that concerns the 
personal life, — the care of health, the culture of faculties, the oc- 
casions of self-assertion. Every moment of conscious existence, 
and every movement of will, — all in fact, that relates to the per- 
sonality, — is brought within the domain of Law. Christianity 
' claims to rule the whole man, and leave no part of his life out of 
the range of its regulating and transforming influence.' 2 For in 
every situation, transaction, or display of feeling, will is required to 
declare itself: moral activity takes place. Duties to self, as loved 
by God, are thus implied in the 'great commandment.' For God 
therein requires of man a consecration of the entire self, an inward 
self-devotion, a reasonable, heartfelt service : He asks for love. 
From this point of view, sin — the false claim to independence — 
is simply wrong self-love. 

Some would even class all shapes of sin as falling under two 
main forms of self-assertion, arrogance, and sensuality. And St. 
Augustine suggests a profound view of the development of the true, 
as compared with the fake society, when he says : ' The two cities 
owe their being to two forms of love : the earthly, to self-love ; the 
heavenly, to the love of God.' 3 

It remains to extend the principle of love to the non-personal 
sphere with which man is in contact. We have seen that absolute 
worth belongs only to personality. But man's relation to the 
creatures below him in the scale of development implies a field of 
duties of which ethics must take cognizance. The non-personal 
part of nature is ordained for subjugation by man. It is included 
in his dominion : terram dedit flits hominum. Yet even in the 
Mosaic Law we find respect enjoined for certain distinctions of 
nature which are not to be overridden or confounded. The 
physical order, like the moral, was to be regarded as sacred. 4 

1 Summa, i. ii ae . c. 5, ' Dilectio sui ipsius includitur in dilectione Dei et prox 
imi ; in hoc enim homo vere se diligit quod se ordinat in Deum.' lb. ii. ii ae . 
xix. 6 : ' Homo se propter Deum, et in Deo diligit.' Aug., Serm., ccxvi. 8 : 
' Amate quod eritis : eritis enim filii Dei.' Pascal, Pense'es, Art. xviii. 15, 
'Que l'homme s'azme, car il a en lui une nature capable de bien/ Cp. But- 
ler, Serm. i., etc. 

2 Sidgwick, Outlines, etc., p. 108. Cp. Dorner, System, etc., p. 459 [Clark]. 

3 Aug., de Civ. Dei, xiv. 28. 

4 See Ex. xxi. 33 foil. ; Deut. xxii. 9 foil. ; Levit. xix. etc. Summa, i. ii ae . i. 
2 : ' Tota irrationalis natura comparatur ad Deum sicut instrumentum ad 
agens principale.' 



xii. Christian Ethics, 409 

Duties, then, of this kind exist ; and they are apparently compre- 
hended in the fourth commandment, which expresses God's crea- 
tive claim on typical orders of living creatures, ordaining that 
* cattle ' are to share the benefit of the Sabbath rest. The sixth 
and eighth commandments again imply the sanctity of physical 
life, and of personal property. And if we pass behind the 
Decalogue, we find animals included in a sense within God's original 
and irreversible covenant. 1 The control therefore of human will 
over nature, animate and inanimate, though comparatively absolute, 
is yet subject to the restrictions which love suggests. For the 
natural world also displays the omnipresent control and watchful 
providence of a Being ' Whose mercy is over all His works.' Physi- 
cal life in this sphere may be treated as a means ; but it must also 
be dealt with ' in harmony with the creative Thought.' 2 

In quitting the subject of duty, we do well to mark the infinite 
extension given to the idea by the treatment of it in connection 
with the doctrine of an Infinite and Holy God. Our Lord, illustrating 
His exposition of the ancient Law by a few significant examples, 
not only opened to His hearers the possibility of a spiritual, tran- 
scendent morality, but also laid down a far-reaching principle of 
obligation. Ihe self-unveiling of the Infinite Being evidently 
makes an infinite claim on the will and affection of intelligent 
creatures. 

With this extension of morality we might compare a somewhat 
parallel feature in the aesthetic sphere. 

Into the arts also, notably into architecture and music, the 
Christian spirit introduced the element of mystery, and found ex- 
pression in them for the idea of infinity, — an idea so alien to the 
Greek genius, which had ever contemplated beauty, and therefore 
ethical Good, as something essentially limited, measurable, sym- 
metrical, exact. 3 Such a thought might suggest a line of abstract 
discussion ; but practical needs remind us that the true range of 
obligation is best interpreted to us by a living ideal. As the writer 
of Ecce Homo remarks, 'The Law which Christ gave was not only 
illustrated, but infinitely enlarged, by His deeds. For every deed 
was itself a precedent to be followed, and therefore to discuss the 
legislation of Christ is to discuss His character ; for it may be justly 
said that Christ Himself is the Christian Law' 4 

1 Consider Gen. ix. 10. Cp. Gen. viii. I ; Prov. xii. io, etc 

2 Martensen, Special Ethics (Indiv.), p. 278 [Clark]. 

3 See Trench, Medieval Church History, Lect.xxvii. Cp. Plato, Phileb, 
6/> E foil. 

4 Ecce Homo, c. x. Cp. St. John xxi. 25. 



410 The Religion of the Incarnation, 

The transition from the discussion of moral Law to that of 
Christian character seems at this point natural and simple. 

III. Christ the Pattern of Character. 

The stress which in Christian Ethics is laid upon personality 
scarcely requires further illustration. The principle of personality 
underlies our fundamental assumption that man is capable of free 
communion with, and imitation of, God. We believe that the 
union between God and man was consummated in and through a 
Person. Further, the spirit in which fulfilment of the Law is pos- 
sible — the spirit of filial love — can only exist in personal rela- 
tions. It corresponds with this general prominence of personality 
that Christianity presents the ideal standard of human character in 
a Person. 

In passing may be noted the fact that this principle to some 
extent emerges in ancient systems. Aristotle's definition of virtue 
naturally occurs to us as admitting the function of an 'expert' 
(6 <j>p6vijxos, 6 <r7rov8cuos) in the right estimation of moral action. 
The Stoic again seeks or invents a trustworthy standard in his ideal 
conception of the 'wise man.' It seems possible that modern 
non-Christian ethics will ultimately substitute for the cultivated 
sense of mankind some form of personal ideal. 1 For ' the Law 
attains its lovable form, its beauty, only when it becomes per- 
sonal ; ' 2 and it might be said with truth that no idea can be formed 
of virtues in the harmony of their combination, until they are seen 
embodied in a person. Just as theology has in the study of Divine 
truth concentrated her gaze on the Person of Jesus Christ as a 
revelation of God; so ethics, in the effort to formulate the law 
of moral perfection, must study the same Divine Person as a type 
of character. 

It is necessary therefore at the outset to recall some salient 
features of the great Example. 

The character of Jesus Christ has been a subject of study to 
thinkers of every period in Christian history, and of infinitely 
varied qualifications for the task. Some have in the supposed 
interest of morality been tempted to lay disproportionate stress 
on the fact of our Lord's manhood. They ask how Christ can be 
an example to humanity, unless He be a Man like other men? 3 

1 It is significant that Mr. Cotter Morison in his ' Service of Man 'discusses 
personal types of Christian saintliness. 

2 Dorner, System, etc., p. 377. 

3 See some remarks on this tendency in Liddon, Bampton Lectures, viii. ; 



xii. Christian Ethics. 411 

From a Christian standpoint, however, it is clear that the efficacy 
of that Example depends on Christ's being a Man unlike other 
men, — unlike them in His relation to the Divine requirement, 
unlike them in His power of contact with the entire race. Thus 
we find ourselves in correspondence with dogmatic truth. The 
mystery of atonement necessitates a sinless Victim ; the Christian 
conception of human life requires a sinless Example. The perfect 
pattern of mankind must in one material respect be as far as pos- 
sible isolated and removed from the race He came to redeem ; for 
sinlessness is a part of the Divine thought concerning human 
nature. 

If again we take into account the scope and significance of His 
redemptive work, it is vain to compare Christ with ' other great 
men.' He came not merely as the Example, but as the Redeemer 
and Saviour of humanity. Were He merely the Example, His 
departure would have left mankind in even deeper anguish and 
helplessness than before His coming. Man would have seen 
the Light, and felt its attraction, only to find himself powerless to 
follow. 

And thus, because Christ is a Man unlike all other men, we 
need in contemplating His character the caution that ' the Divine 
Reality is apart from, and even greater than what the greatest have 
thought of it and said of it.' x The ideal conception of character 
presented either in Pagan thought, or even in the volume of Messi- 
anic prophecy, has been indefinitely enriched, and illuminated by 
the Life which had before been only dimly foreshadowed, or at 
the best darkly understood. 

Now it may be said, with no violation of the proportion of truth, 
that the most important part of the Gospel revelation concerned 
man's true relation to God. In the forefront of Christ's teaching 
is set the doctrine of the Divine Fatherhood. He impressed this 
truth on men not more by His express utterances, than by the 
example of His own habitual attitude towards God. It may be 
justly allowed that our Lord taught and displayed among men ' a 
new type of goodness, the filial and dependent.' In Him we see 
the activity of ' a perfectly filial will.' 2 

and an Art. in the Church Quart. Rev., July, 1883, on ' Our Lord's Human 
Example.' For what follows, cp. Martensen, Ethics (General), pp. 242, 256. 

1 Dean Church, Serm. on Christ's Example [Gifts of Civilization. Serm. 
in.]. 

2 R. H. Hutton. Essay on the Incarnation and Principles of Evidence. 
Cp. the remarkable definition of Lactantius, Div. Inst, iii. 9 : ' Pietas nihil 
aliud est quam Dei parentis agnitio.' lb. 10 : ' EfHcitur ut is agnoscat Deum, 
qui unde ortus sit, quasi recordetur.' 



412 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

It will be useful to expand this suggestive thought somewhat 
more fully. 

First, then, we see in Christ the perfect example of filial depen- 
dence on God. 1 This dependence is not mere passivity of will, — 
such as the record of the Temptation exhibits ; not simply a con- 
fiding trust in the providence and sustaining power of God. We 
rather see in Christ's spirit of dependence a motive which impels 
Him to fearless, unfettered activity, and supports Him under the 
keenest stress of trial and suffering. He speaks- and acts ever as 
One Who, in each situation, is aware of the controlling hand of 
infinite Wisdom and Love. He has that entire security in the 
certainty of Divine guidance, to which no emergency comes as a 
surprise, no call for action brings disturbance. He knows that 
1 the works ' which tax His human faculties and weary His bodily 
frame, are such as the Father ' has given Him to perfect.' A filial 
trustfulness is thus the secret at once of His energy and His 
repose ; His promptness in action and His calmness in awaiting 
the suitable moment for it ; His unbroken heavenly-mindedness 
and His self-spending devotion in ministry and works of love. It 
makes possible the majestic serenity which never deserts Him 
during the scenes of His Passion. 'I am not alone,' He says, 
'because the Father is with Me.' 2 

In such a spirit of dependence may be recognized the true law 
of creaturely life ; and there is nothing in that spirit which degrades 
or impairs the true dignity of human nature. Nay, there is some- 
thing in this dependence of a filial heart which seems to chasten 
and exalt the character, while it quickens the intelligence of man. 
For in fulfilling his own true law, and responding to the will of his 
Maker, man finds himself admitted to the secret of the universe ; 
he is in harmony with the purpose that underlies and guides its 
entire movement. So also, we venture to say, it is with the Ideal 
Man. ' Everywhere He sees the Divine unity of thought which 
permeates, embraces, and binds all things together, the spiritual 
and the material, the visible and the invisible, the earthly and the 
heavenly, in one vast economy.' 3 To Him the promise seems ful- 
filled, ' Thou shalt be in league with the stones of the field, and 
the beasts of the field shall be at peace with thee.' To Him the 

1 See Trench, Syn. of the N. T., § 42 (on Tcnreivofipoo-uvri). ' In His 
Human Nature [Christ] must be the pattern of all humility, of all creaturely 
dependence. . . . He evermore, as Man, took the place which beseemed the 
creature in the presence of its Creator.' 

2 St. John xvi. 32. 

3 Martensen, Ethics (General), p. 255. Cp. Job v. 23. 



xii. Christian Ethics, 413 

world of humanity, and the world of physical nature disclose their 
inner law ; He knows what is in them ; He intuitively reads their 
secret ; He can trace beneath the apparent discords of the uni- 
verse the outlines of a broken but recoverable harmony. And 
thus the attitude of filial dependence on God is found to be the 
condition of a right relation to all that He has made ; it opens the 
way to a true understanding of God's ways, and of that living 
principle of Love which binds all things in one, — binds them 
indeed 

' By gold chains about the feet of God.' 

Next, we may contemplate Christ's character as the type of 
filial obedience, 1 — of a complete harmony between human will 
and the law of holiness. In Christ the ideal of free will is realized. 2 
We are not now concerned with the vast issues of that sinless 
obedience. It is enough to study it as embodying a principle of 
purely human perfection, enjoined indeed repeatedly in the Old 
Testament as the one condition of covenantal union with God, 
but once only in history adequately fulfilled in a human life. Obe- 
dience, based on absolute trust in the character and purpose of 
God ; an e obedience of faith/ yet in its essence the obedience not 
of a servant, but of a son ; an obedience that refuses nothing, 
shrinks from nothing, questions nothing that presents itself as 
Divine requirement ; such is seen to be the law of Christ's Life, 
the law to Him of action and of endurance, the rule of prayer, 
the principle of sacrifice, the motive of service, the well-spring of 
thanksgiving and joy. If the entire completeness of this obedience 
becomes One Who wears ' the form of a servant, ' the willingness 
of it marks the glad service of a Son. And because the fulfil- 
ment by Jesus of the Father's will is spontaneous, free, whole- 
hearted, sacrificial, it wins acceptance as the offering of One 
j well-pleasing ' and ' beloved.' Perfected by submission to suffer- 
ing and death, the obedience of Jesus is stamped with the token 
of Divine satisfaction by His rising from the dead. 

And finally, Christ is the perfect pattern of filial love. He 
taught the human heart that the All- Holy God can be the object 
of its highest affection, its purest passion, its deepest joy. In 
Christ we see the filial character consummated ; in Him we find 

1 Christ's earthly life and work are described summarily as tnraKo-n, Rom. 
v. 19. Cp. Phil. ii. 8. 

2 Aug. de Praed. Sanct. xxx : ' An . . . in Illo non libera voluntas erat, 
ac non tanto magis erat, quanto magis peccare non poterat?' Quoted by 
Liddon, Bampt. Lect. [ed. 11], note c. 



41 4 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

the union of serene repose with consuming zeal, unwavering loy- 
alty, and sympathetic self-devotion to the Father's work ; in other 
words, we find creaturely perfection, combined with the spirit of 
sonship. In many and mysterious ways indeed, does this filial 
love of the true Son display itself: in a hunger and thirst after 
righteousness ; in a patience which can bide the time, and endure 
the chastisements, of God ; in an overflowing tenderness towards 
all God-created beings because they are His, and in their measure 
bear witness of Him ; in a faith which ' hopeth all things ' and 
labors to make all things perfect. Such is the spirit of the Son ; 
and we ' learn of Him ' the loftiness of the height to which a filial 
love of God may raise human character, the tenacious strength it 
may impart to human will, the peace it may shed on a human 
heart. Love is ' the bond of perfectness,' and to wear the image 
of the Son is to be conformed through Love to the likeness of the 
Father Himself. 1 

The example of virtue is thus seen in a character of which 
some aspects have been just considered; and we may pause at 
this point, in order to form some conclusion as to the factors of 
virtuous action judged from the Christian standpoint. 

To have moral worth, an action must be the outcome of an 
entire bent, or disposition of the agent. Good fruit is to be 
expected only from a good tree. 2 In the virtuous act the agent's 
personality is engaged as a whole ; his whole nature is directed 
towards a single object. This inward unity is perhaps what we 
really mean by ' simplicity.' In such action, the human being 
most nearly approaches the concentrated and harmonious energy 
of the Divine Life. 3 The person acts as an undivided whole, each 
part of his nature is for the time directed aright. 

But we are here reminded that man's nature is disordered : it 
can produce nothing truly good, except in so far as it is restored 
to harmony by Divine power. God, says Thomas Aquinas, calls 
us to a supernatural end, which by his natural powers man could 
not attain. God Himself must therefore impart the supernatural 
principle necessary to aid man in responding to the call. 4 No 
act, in short, can be strictly called ' good ' which is dissociated 
from the direct action of God : for i there is none good but One, 
that is, God ' :— 

1 Aug., de mor. Eccl., xxiii. : ' Fit ergo per caritatem ut conformemur Deo.' 

2 Dorner, pp. 336, 388. Cp. Ecce Homo, p. 136. 

8 Arist, Eth., vii. 14, § 8, remarks that human nature is not simple (a.Tr\rj), 
adding : ewe], e? tov 7] (pjcris a-rrXr) efy ae\ 7) avTTj irpa^is r)5i(TTr) icrrcu. Aib 6ebs 
dei fiiau Kal airKrjv x a ' l P eL V$ovr)v, K. t. A. Cp. Bk. x. CC. 4. § 9, and 7, § 8. 

4 Summa, i. ii ae . Qu. lxii. Art. 1. Cp. St. Matt. xix. 17. 



xii. Christian Ethics. 415 

* O work thy works in God ; He can rejoice in nought 
Save only in Himself, and what Himself has wrought.' 1 

We conclude that in a good action there is a true harmony of the 
different elements in personality, — intelligence, affection, will ; 
and further that such harmony presupposes the action of super- 
natural power on man's nature. It agrees with this that Chris- 
tian moralists give to the chief principles of virtuous action the 
name of ' theological virtues,' and regard them as supernaturally 
imparted. 

A good action, then, implies right intelligence. There must be 
an exercise of faith, which is a principle of knowledge, — a corre- 
spondence between human faculties and an unseen object. Faith 
accepts the good as the proper element of man's perfection ; takes 
God at His word, and aims at pleasing Him. 'Without faith it is 
impossible to please Him.' 2 Next, will asserts itself. Will is 
directed towards an end desirable and attainable by effort, and 
thus is inspired by Hope. A study of Christ's example suggests 
that the highest object of hope for man is the perfection of his 
nature through the means appointed by God. 3 We see in Christ 
something of the desire and the joy of moral achievement. When 
He said that ' the workman is worthy of his reward,' He pointed 
to the possibility of a true, unselfish pleasure in good work as 
such : of that thirst for perfection and self- dissatisfaction which 
distinguishes the true artist from common men. 

Lastly, there remains that which is the dominant factor in Chris- 
tian goodness, Love. There is an element of passion in Christlike 
holiness, which differentiates it from philosophic conceptions of 
virtue as a tranquil, balanced state. 4 Love gives worth to the 
fulfilment of duty ; embraces, in union with God, the Divine aim 
of creation ; and manifests itself in spontaneity and inventive 
activity, transforming the fulfilment of obligation into an occasion 
of joyous and delightful service. Our Lord represents this 'ardent, 

1 Abp. Trench. 

2 Heb. xi. 6. Cp. I St. John iv. 16; Rom. xiv. 23. Summa, i. ii ae - Qu. 
lxii. art. 3, ' Quantum ad intellectum adduntur homini qusedam principia 
supernaturalia, quae divino lumine capiuntur; et haec sunt credibilia de 
quibus est fides.' lb. art. 4 : ' Per fidem apprehendit intellectus ea quae 
sperat et amat. Unde opportet quod ordine generationis fides praecedat 
spem et caritatem.' 

3 St. John iv. 34; v. 36; xvii. 4. Cp. H. S. Holland, Serm. on 'The 
Energy of Unselfishness.' With regard to the relation of Pleasure to action, 
we may observe that pleasure is inseparable from the right and effective 
exercise of any faculty, and therefore accompanies virtuous activity, but can 
never be the moral end oi action. Cp. Arist., Eth., vii. 12, § 3, etc. 

4 See Ecce Homo, c. xiii. 



4 1 6. The Religion of the Incarnation. 

passionate, devoted state ' of heart as the real root of virtue. 
Without it the most punctilious obedience is nothing ; for not to 
love is not to live. 1 

Having thus indicated the place of intelligence, will, and af- 
fection in virtuous activity, we are free to study the Christian 
character, and perhaps ascertain its permanent features, — those 
elements in it which have survived the test of such wide variety of 
historical conditions. We have to inquire what is common to the 
types of Christian life which different ages, states of civilization, 
and forms of nationality have produced? For character is that 
which is capable of development in varied situations, of free and 
spontaneous self-adaptation to every change of environment. Cir- 
cumstance proves its quality, offers it a field of exercise, and 
ministers to its growth. 

Our task is rather to sketch a character than to classify virtues. 
'The earliest Christians,' says the writer of Ecce Homo, 'felt a 
natural repugnance to describe the goodness at which they aimed 
by the name of Virtue.' Within limits indeed such a classification 
is possible : and a principle of division may be applied even to a 
thing so mysterious, so subtle in its shapes and gradations, so 
fruitful in surprises, as character. We may, for instance, take as a 
basis the principle of personality, and consider the Christian per- 
sonality in its threefold relationship : to God, to itself, to its 
neighbor, and in contact with the hindrances, moral and physical, 
presented by its environment. 2 

I. The Christian personality in relation to God. 

The distinctive feature of Christian character consists in con- 
sciousness of that filial relation to God which Grace restores ; of 
the spiritual bond that exists between the human soul and ' Him 
who is invisible.' Hence the goodness at which the Christian 
aims is that which will bear the searching light of the Divine eye. 
1 He chose us out of the world/ says St. Paul, 'that we might be 
holy and blameless before Him. * Thus in its essence Christian 
character is based on a peculiar sense of relationship to God ; 
there underlies it a constant desire of union with God, a temper of 
loyalty, a spirit of thankful dependence, a feeling of nearness to 
the Divine presence. Were it true, as has been said, that ' the 

1 Aug., de mor. Eccl., xix : ' Id ipsum quo diligimus Deum mori non 
potest, nisi dum non diligit Deum : cum mors ipsa sit non diligere Deum.* 
Cp. Cyp., de Unit, xiv. 

2 Such classification, corresponding to three cardinal virtues, seems to be 
implied in St. Paul's words, Tit. ii. 12: 'iva. . . . <r(0<pp6vu)S, ko.1 diKaiws ko.\ 
evare/Scas tfjcrco/j.ei'. 



xii. Christian Ethics. 417 

Divine service' had ' become human service,' 1 Christian character 
as a distinct type would have ceased to be. 

From this attitude of mind and will two results follow : first, 
singleness of aim, — the 'single eye.' The sense of personal 
relation to God gives directness, truthfulness, simplicity to speech, 
action, and thought. So far as he is true to his profession a 
Christian is independent of the current opinions of his age 
or community, seeking only to live ' in all good conscience ' 
towards God. The conviction of an unseen Presence guides 
his actions ; an unseen Witness penetrates his thought ; an unseen 
Master holds him accountable. Indeed St. Paul seems to regard 
holy living as consisting simply in the endeavor to ' please God.' 2 

And a second characteristic of the Christian is his view of life in 
the world, of nature, of humanity itself. He observes, judges, 
estimates all things from the standpoint of the spiritual mind. He 
aims at bringing his own thoughts and desires into harmony 
with the Divine will and purpose. He looks out on the world, 
with its complex social order, its fascinating interest, its appealing 
needs, as a sphere in which for a while he is called to move and to 
labor. Into the varied tasks and interests of life he can throw 
himself with large-hearted sympathy, and with the greater fervor 
because the time is short, and the need of self-forgetful activity 
urgent. ' Once a real Christian,' writes Lacordaire, ' the world did 
not vanish before my eyes ; it rather assumed nobler proportions 
as I myself did. I began to see therein a noble sufferer needing 
help. I could imagine nothing comparable to the happiness of 
ministering to it under the eye of God, with the help of the Cross 
and the Gospel of Christ.' 3 

But the world is not the Christian's { abiding city.' He walks in 
it and passes through it in pilgrim fashion, with heart detached 
from it and all that it can give. He cannot commit himself to the 
world, nor identify himself with it. He has the internal freedom 
of a heart that has found its true centre ; he is able to estimate 
visible things at their real worth, and 

' To stand in freedom loosened from this world.' 4 

Thus to have the 'mind of Christ' is to judge of life and 
the things of time with His judgment, to see with His eyes, to 

1 J. Cotter Morison, The Service of Man, p. 194 [ed. 3]. See Eph. i. 4; 
Col. i. 22; St. Luke i. 75. 

2 Rom. viii. 8; 1 Col. vii. 32 ; I Thess. iv. 1. An instructive contrast 
might be drawn between the Pagan and Christian use of the word apeo-fcela. 

3 Lacordaire : a Biographical Sketch, H. S. Lear, p. 34. 

* Wordsworth, The Excursion. Ep., ad Diog., v. : iracra ^iv-q -n-arpts £<mv 

27 



4*8 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

be inspired by His Wisdom. So we find ourselves in natural 
contact with the division of character by ' cardinal virtues.' 
' Prudence ' or ' Wisdom ' is the outcome of a right relation 
to God. God only, St. Augustine says, is to be loved; this 
world, and all sensible things, are to be used. Prudence is 
love discerning between the things which bring it nearer to God, 
and those which hinder it from approaching Him. 1 

II. In relation to humanity, and creaturely life in general, 
the Christian finds scope for 'active morality,' 2 for ministering 
love. The life of union with God inspires and prompts the life of 
service to mankind. The infinitely varied relationships of life 
constitute so many forms of moral obligation. Christian Justice 
means nothing less than rendering to all their due. The desire to 
imitate God is at once the motive and the rule of Christian activ- 
ity. 3 And this desire finds expression in two distinctively Christian 
graces : the spirit of forgiveness and the spirit of compassion. 

The inculcation of forgiveness is ' the most striking innovation ' 
in the ethics of the Gospel. 4 Greek thought on the subject 
presents a remarkable contrast. Aristotle is inclined to regard 
forgiveness as a form of weakness, but allied to virtue in so far as 
it involves resistance to passion. The ground of Christian for- 
giveness is very different. The duty of it follows partly of course 
from a consideration of the common human nature which the 
offender shares with the injured ; partly also from a dispassionate 
view of the injury inflicted. In exercising forgiveness we suppress 
that false self-love or partiality which magnifies a private injury. 
The Christian loves himself not more than he loves his neighbor. 
He can put himself in the offender's place, and consider what is 
for his highest good. He will not allow the sense of injury to 
interfere with or override the exercise of good-will even towards 
enemies. Certainly the sense of his own moral frailty, and of his 
indebtedness to Divine mercy, will restrain the Christian from 
vindictiveness or harshness in regard to the faults of others ; while 
the fact of the equality of men in relation to their common Father, 



avToov Kai iracra irarph l-evr). This spirit does not exclude a true patriotis?n y 
and other civil virtues. Martensen, Ethics (Social), § 82. 

1 De mor. Eccl., xxxvii. and xxv. Cp. Bern., de Consid., v. I. 

2 See the chap, with this title in Ecce Homo. 

3 St. Matt. v. 44 foil. Leo, Serm. in Quad., vii. ' Forma conversations 
fidelium ab exemplo venit operum divinorum et merito Deus imitationem 
Sui ab eis exigit, quos ad imaginem et similitudinem suam fecit.' Cp. 
Iren., iv. 13, 3. 

4 Ecce Homo, c. xxii. Cp. Butler, Serm. ix. etc. 



xii. Christian Ethics. 419 

invests even the anti-social sinner with the dignity of brotherhood. 1 
But forgiving love is no mere expression of self-distrust. It is fired 
by something of the generous hopefulness, the quickness to detect 
latent capacities of nobleness even in the worst, which is the glory 
of the Divine forgiveness. It 'rejoiceth not in iniquity, but 
rejoiceth with the truth ; ' ' believeth all things, hopeth all things.' 
The Greek indeed had his idea of forbearance ; to him it meant 
something less than strict justice ; it was a virtue difficult to 
place or estimate. Logically, it was scarcely to be praised. At 
the best it would never have implied the habitual duty of active 
forgiveness. 

Not less distinctive of the Christian character is compassion* 
and the active beneficence which results from it. Humanity, 
by Jesus Christ, was transformed : it was ' changed (to adopt 
a celebrated phrase) from a restraint to a motive.' Compassion 
may display itself in readiness both to relieve the physical needs 
of another, and to edify his character. To love one's fellow-man 
as one's self implies willingness to benefit him in body and estate 
by every means ; but it is also incompatible with unconcern 
or apathy as to his spiritual and moral welfare. Love is comunica- 
tive, and will not withhold its best treasure. Hence compassion 
prompts missionary activity, and zeal for moral and social reforms. 
Nor has ' humanity ' ceased to be a restraint by becoming a motive. 
Christian justice contains the principle of ' innocentia ' as well as of 
' benevolentia? ' Love worketh no ill to his neighbor ; ' it can 
inflict no wrong, it can withhold no good ; ' therefore love is the 
fulfilling of the Law.' 3 

Active morality has many departments. Duty to the ' powers 
that be ' — the order of society, human law, the State, the Church : 
all this, into which the science of politics inquires, forms part of 
the obligation involved in love to man. How comprehensive 
is the reply of an early Apologist to the charge of disloyalty, 
' we behave towards Emperors exactly as we do towards our 

1 Leo, Serm. in quad, passim, esp. v., vi., ix. Ecce Homo, c. xxiii. For 
what follows, see Arist. Eth. v. 10. Cp. Eph. iv. 32. 

2 Mozley, Univ. Serm. ix. 'Ancient philosophy never opened the mine 
of happiness which lay in this principle. It was a discovery, like that of a 
new scientific principle, when it was made ; and Christianity made it.' 

3 Rom. xiii. 10. Note the following words of St. Aug. (de doct. Christ., i. 
29) : ' Velle debemus, ut omnes nobiscum diligant Deum, et totum quod vel 
eos adjuvamus vel adjuvamur eis, ad unum ilium finem referendum est. . . . 
Hinc efficitur ut inimicos etiam nostros diligamus. . . . Misereamur, quia 
tanto magis nos oderunt, quanto ab illo quern diligimus separati sunt.' Cp. De 
disc. Chr., v. ' Necesse est ut quem diligis tanquam te ipsum, illuc ilium tra- 
has ad quod et tu amas.' Ecce Homo, cc. xvii., xviii. 



420 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

neighbors. To wish, or to do, or to think evil is equally forbidden 
to us in any case.' 1 'Thou/ cries St. Augustine, apostrophizing 
the Church, — 'Thou bringest within the bond of mutual love 
every relationship of kindred, every alliance of affinity; Thou 
unitest citizen to citizen, nation to nation, man to man, not only in 
society, but in fraternity. Thou teachest kings to seek the welfare 
of their peoples, and peoples to be subject to kings. . . . Thou 
showest how to all love is due, and injury to none ! ' 2 

III. In the life of active beneficence, self-sacrifice is no 'occa- 
sional heroism,' but an ' habitual mood.' 3 And yet from the very 
nature of Christian love it follows that there is a right self-regard, a 
zeal for God's kingdom in the soul, a desire for the highest welfare 
of the personality as an object of worth in itself, and destined to 
find its perfection in God. 

Love to self becomes Temperance, that is, the spirit of purifying 
discipline. Thus, a mark of Christian character is the passion for 
holiness : i. e. t the desire to combine inward purity of thought, desire, 
and motive, with the external fulfilment of duty. 

This process of self-purification is both mental and moral. It 
includes the culture of imagination not less than the control of 
appetite : ' sobriety ' not less in judgment and reflection than in the 
indulgence of desire ; humility in self-estimate, not less than restraint 
of passion. 4 The dominant feature of Christian character in this 
connection is a peculiar self-severity, a deep sense of the ideal as 
something not yet attained, a strict fidelity to known truth and the 
claim of moral law, sensitiveness to moral evil, and watchfulness 
against even its distant approach ; in a word, disciplined rule in the 
affections, intellect, and will. For as the Hellenist sage says of 
Wisdom, 'The very true beginning of Her is the desire of dis- 
cipline, and the beginning of discipline is love.' 5 Temperance 
includes that reverent care of the body which receives so high a 
sanction in the New Testament ; indeed, respect for the sanctity of 
the body may be viewed as reverence for the presence of God 
Himself, and for the place of His abode. 6 

1 Tert, Apol., 36. 

2 De mor. Eccl., lxiii. [Clark] Obs. There are duties imposed by our 
relationship even to the dead, to posterity, and of course to the impersonal 
creature. See Martensen, Ethics (Indiv.), §§ 116-118. On duties to poster- 
ity, see a beautiful passage in Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture, vi., § 9. 

3 Dean Church, Disc, of the Christian Character, p. 101, Cp. Ecce Home 
[ed. 13], p. 178. 

4 See Rom. xii. 3 ; 2 Cor. x. 5. 
8 Wisdom vi. 17. 

6 1 Cor. vi. 19. 



xii. Christian Ethics. 421 

IV. Finally, in relation to the hindrances which Virtue encoun- 
ters — the stress of circumstance, the pressure of misfortune, per- 
secution, loss, temptation, and the like — Love displays itself as 
Fortitude, and finds both a passive and active sphere of exercise. 

As a passive virtue fortitude is the ' world-resisting ' element in 
character. The hostility of the world to virtue is only one form of 
its hostility to God. 1 Fortitude is thus essentially the same in all 
stages of social development. When the world-principle was em- 
bodied in a concrete form, and became in the imperial power of 
Rome a definite force hostile to the Church, 2 fortitude displayed 
itself for the most part as patience under persecution (St. Augus- 
tine in his treatment of this virtue naturally contemplates it under 
this aspect) ; but the precise form of influence to be resisted will 
obviously vary from age to age, while the element of resistance in 
Christian character remains constant. 

The name of ' fortitude,' however, must not be restricted to pas- 
sive endurance, prominent as this virtue is in Christ's teaching. 
Fortitude embraces spheres of action, and will display itself on occa- 
sion as resentment. Righteous anger has its source in the temper 
exactly opposed to Stoic apathy respecting sin — that ' loveless 
view' of mankind which said, ' Trouble not thyself; thy neighbor 
sins, but he sins for himself.' 3 There can be no true love of good 
without a just abhorrence of evil. Hence it sometimes occurs that 
love takes the form of indignation and holy zeal — when directed, 
for example, against oppression, cruelty, ingratitude, deceit, selfish- 
ness. Such resentment is a natural and generous emotion, born of 
sympathy with God Himself. Comparing with the Christian con- 
ception of resentment Aristotle's discussion of anger, we find that 
Christian teachers lay stress on the social end of resentment. What 
the good Christian resents is not a personal hurt, but injury and 
wrong-doing viewed as injurious to his neighbor or the community ; 
such resentment is distinguished by purity of motive ; in certain 
circumstances it is not unwilling to inflict pain. 

Moral courage, again, is the form which fortitude assumes under 
other circumstances, too numerous to be specified. Generally it 
is displayed on occasions when the Christian is bearing witness to 
the cause of truth or righteousness before men. No Christian can 

1 Ep. ad Diog., vi. : fiiau XpitTTidvovs 6 k6o~/j.os /X7]5hf abiKovfxevos, on ra?s 
fjSovcus dj/TiTaao-ovrai. 

2 See Westcott, Essay on The Church and the World [in his ed. of St. 
John's Epp.]. 

3 Trench, Syn. of N. T., § xxxvii. On ' Resentment ' see Ecce Homo, c. 
xxi. ; Butler, Serm. viii. Cp. Arist, Eth., iv. 5. See also Dale, The Atone- 
ment, Lect. viii. 



422 The Religion of the Incarnatio?i, 

rid himself of his share in the function of witness, committed to His 
followers by Christ. And fortitude, or manliness, is the virtue of a 
witness, — of the solitary champion of a good cause confronting 
opposition in any of its forms. The name ' athlete/ which we find 
applied to martyrs in early times, may remind us that the task which 
beyond others must needs test a man's power to endure, and to 
stand alone, is that of witnessing steadfastly for righteousness and 
truth. Yet the call to bear witness comes in ways unexpected, and 
difficult to define or classify ; it may, for example, be a man's diffi- 
cult duty to withstand, not opponents, but adherents and friends ; 
to hold his own, not against ' the sneers and opposition of the bad, 
but the opinion and authority of the good.' * With this passing 
remark we quit the subject. 

In the above sketch of Christian character we have confined our- 
selves to some salient features. We have said nothing of the 
gracious union it presents of delicacy with strength, of communica- 
tiveness with reserve, of energy with restfulness, of passion with 
tenderness. It is difficult to delineate character without giving a 
look of formality to what is essentially a mysterious, albeit, well- 
marked, product. In Christian goodness we see the handiwork of 
the Spirit of God, and where He is, there is liberty. 

It is indeed objected that this type of character is too rare, too 
exalted for the majority of mankind. It is said that a standard of 
perfection is set before them which it is hopeless to think of attain- 
ing ; that men are disheartened ; that Christian teachers ' ask for 
the impossible,' and undermine belief in the possibility of virtue. 
It is further suggested that the rarity of the type proves that the 
saint ' is born, not made ; ' and that radical change of character 
and disposition is impossible. 2 

The last point may be noticed in another connection. At pres- 
ent we may suggest, in reply to these reflections, one consideration. 
The objector forgets that Christianity does not merely present a 
moral standard to men ; it provides them with an entire system 
of moral education. The Church recognizes different degrees of 
maturity and attainment in her children. It is no part of her 
method, though possibly an accident of a particular age or set of 
conditions, that she sets strong meat before babes, and appeals to 
children as if they were grown men. That very ' individual treat- 

1 Dean Church, Gifts of Civilization, p. 323. Cp. Martineau, Types of 
Eth. Theory, ii. 200-202. 

2 See Service of Man, cc. vii. and ix. These objections have been often 
met. See Dean Church, Sermon on ' Christ's Example.' Liddon, Bampt. 
Lect. [ed. n] p. 130. 



xir. Christian Ethics. 423 

ment' of characters on which the writer of the 'Service of Man' 
insists, is a fundamental principle of the Christian system. 1 



IV. Christ the Source of the Re-creation of Character. 

The subject which we now approach is, taken as a whole, pecu- 
liar to Christian Ethics. For it will be admitted that Christianity 
alone offers a solution of the practical problem, How is the ideal of 
virtue to be translated into life and practice ? ' It is the essential 
weakness/ says a living writer, ' of all mere systems of morality, and 
of most, if not all, other religions, that they confine themselves to 
pointing out what the facts of life ought to be, and make no pro- 
vision whatever for dealing with facts as they are. ... It is their 
main defect, not that they conflict with Christianity, but that they 
fail to touch the problem with which it most directly deals/ 2 Of 
course, in advancing this claim for Christianity we imply that it is 
something vastly greater than a system of morals. It is a Divine 
way of salvation, that is, of deliverance from sin, as well as from its 
effects ; the process by which the ideal becomes actual in life and 
character is also, as we have seen, a process of restoration. Chris- 
tianity, in fact, professes to be a Divinely provided remedy for dis- 
order and disease ; strictly speaking, therefore, a treatise on ethics 
must investigate the pathology of sin, regarded as the violation of 
moral order, and the fatal misdirection of desire. This aspect of 
the Gospel has been too much disregarded, even by Christian 
thinkers. 3 It follows, however, from the Scriptural account of man 
that he has lost something which can only be supernaturally 
restored : and it is the practical task of ethics to point out the 
means of renewal, which Divine Wisdom has provided. 

The mysterious facts which lie at the root of the re-creative pro- 
cess must be briefly noticed. Christian holiness is the reproduc- 
tion in the individual of the life of the Incarnate Son of God. 
That this might be possible, there took place that series of events 
which St. John describes as the glorification of Jesus Christ. The 
life, perfectly well-pleasing to God, and therefore the supreme 

1 Aug., de mor. Eccl., lxiii. ' Tu [Ecclesia] pueriliter pueros, fortiter 
juvenes, quiete senes prout cuiusque non corporis tantum, sed et animi aetas 
est, exerces ac doces, etc.' Cp. Amb., de Off. Min., i. 17. 

2 Wace, Boyle Lect. (ser. 1) v. Cp. Ecce Homo, c. ix. We may consider 
how Christ gives a practical turn to speculative inquiries. St. Luke xiii. 23, 
24; St. John xxi. 21 foil. 

3 E. g. Clem, of Alexandria. See Bigg, The Christian Platonists of Alex- 
andria, p. 80. 



424 The Religion of the Incarnation, 

standard of. holiness, passes through the stage of death. The 
Sacrifice on Calvary removes the barrier raised between the 
Creator and His creatures by sin. The Resurrection is, on the 
one hand, the seal of God's acceptance stamped upon His Son's 
atoning work ; on the other, marks the final stage in that process 
by which Christ's human nature is i perfected.' 1 For by the 
Resurrection that Nature is spiritualized, is released from earthly 
limitations, and becomes available as a re-creative force. The 
Ascension is the condition of Christ's manifestation as ' a quicken- 
ing Spirit,' as the 'power of God.' By sacramental channels He 
communicates to our entire nature His life-giving humanity, as 
the means of our re-creation after the image of God. Thus the 
life of the Incarnate is extended in the life of the redeemed, and 
by a natural and orderly growth, the character of Christ is repro- 
duced in His members through the continuous operation of the 
Spirit, whose office it is to ' take of the things of Christ and show 
them unto ' men. He who is outwardly our example thus becomes 
an inward principle of life. 

We now are in a position to estimate the extent to which Chris- 
tian morality depends on dogmatic truths. Apart from Jesus 
Christ there can be no true life. The secret of holiness lies in 
a permanent relation to a living Christ. He, by His life and 
death, •' became unto us Wisdom, Righteousness, Sanctification, 
Redemption.' 2 The example was not upheld in vain ; for Christ 
placed within our reach the spiritual forces by which alone the 
pattern can be reproduced in human life. ' Sanctification ' means 
the progressive appropriation by man of the life of the Son of 
God ; the formation in him, by successive stages, of the very 
image of Christ. The objective aspect of sanctification is clearly 
presented in the Old Testament ; holiness there implies consecra- 
tion, and is thought of chiefly as an objective work of God. In 
the New Testament, the idea of holiness passes from the sphere 
of worship to that of morality. But the Old Testament concep- 
tion is not lost ; it is expanded. Holiness, according to the Chris- 
tian view, results not from the efforts of man, but from the outflow 
and operation of a Divine Life. Holiness is spoken of as 'the 
righteousness of God,' as a ' free gift ' imparted to man ; and in 
the first instance requires receptivity rather than activity on the 
part of the human soul. 

1 St. Luke xiii. 32 ; Heb. ii. 10, v. 9. Cp. 1 Cor. xv. 45 ; and see Gal. ii. 
20, iv. 19. Also an Art. in Ch. Qu. Rev., No. xxxii., on ' Our Lord's Human 
Example.' 

2 1 Cor. i. 30. Cp. Rom. viii. 29. For the thought that follows, see Pro- 
fessor Bruce on Heb. ii. 11-18 in Expositor, No. 50. 



xii. Christian Ethics. 425 

The ethical significance of baptism is thus intelligible. By 
baptism the individual is brought into vital contact with the Source 
of the new life, and enters the sphere within which radiate the 
spiritual forces that flow from the glorified humanity of Christ; 
the germ of a ?iew personality is imparted ; the kingdom of God 
is entered. But in this new birth the work is only begun ; for the 
' Grace of God that bringeth salvation ' has an abiding home among 
men. It is misleading to speak of Grace as ' an unknown factor.' 
Still more so to assert that ' Theology has always been celebrating 
the power of Grace, to the depreciation of Ethics.' * Grace has 
its fixed channels and methods, its orderly movement and outflow, 
its certain conditions, its appointed places and seasons, its definite, 
though mysterious, laws of operation. 2 Grace is, so to speak, 
stored and dispensed within the mediatorial kingdom which Christ 
founded in His Church. From an ethical standpoint the Church 
of God is before all else a school of character? the Divinely 
appointed sphere in which, normally, the re-creation of personality 
proceeds, in which men are sanctified by being kept in living 
union and contact with Jesus Christ Himself. 

To enumerate the several ' means of grace ' committed to the 
stewardship of the Church is the task of theology, as also to 
explain the conditions of fruitfully using them. On one point only 
it may be worth while to make a few remarks. 

To Christianity, as we have seen, each individual personality is 
an end in itself. Each has a right to moral education ; each was 
called into being that it might embody a particular thought of God, 
that it might fulfil good works prepared specially for //, and cor- 
respond with its own separate ideal. 4 Hence, true to the spirit 
of Him who was a Physician of the sick, Christianity offers her 
Divine remedies to the worst and most hardened natures. She 
believes in her power to renew and transfigure them, to achieve 
in them a moral miracle. Nobler natures, again, she endeavors 
to train up to the full stature of Christ-like character, sanctifying, 
consecrating, and elevating the innate capacities of each. Her 
healing mission extends to all men. She knows nothing of the 
aristocratic temper of ancient ethics, which would confine the very 
possibility of a moral life to the few. She rejoices in the infinite 

1 Service of Man, pp. 84, 85. 

2 Chrys., in Joh., horn. x. 2 : afxa Se na\ ivfeU-aardai fiovXerai '6ti ofy dirXws 
ovSe 7] x°-P ls eTetcni/, dAAa ro?s ^ov\o/u.evois Kai icnrovSctKocri, k. t.A. 

3 See Tit. ii. 11, 12 : 7) x&P 1 * • • • irai8evov<ra v/acis. St. Matt, xxviii. 19, 20. 
Aug , de disc. Chr., i. : '•Discipline domus est Ecclesia Christi.' Butler, Anal- 
ogy, pt. ii. c. 1. 

4 Consider Col. i. 28 ; Eph. ii. 10. 



426 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

variety of typical forms which character may assume. A Christian 
poet has said, — 

' There is not on the earth a soul so base 

But may obtain a place, 

In covenanted grace ; 
So that his feeble prayer of faith obtains 

Some loosening of his chains 
And earnests of the great release, which rise 
From gift to gift, and reach at length the eternal prize. 

'All may save self ; — but minds that heavenward tower 

Aim at a wider power, 

Gifts on the world to shower. 
And this is not at once ; by fastings gained 

And trials well sustained ; 
By pureness, righteous deeds, and toils of love, 
Abidance in the truth, and zeal for God above.' 1 

Now this idea of individual perfection, so characteristic of 
Christianity, is in the New Testament not dissociated from the 
idea of a society, family, or household of God, in which alone the 
full development of Christian character can be achieved. Cor- 
porate life, with its network of relationships, its mutual services, 
its common worship, its visible pledges of brotherhood, — this is 
God's great instrument in the edification of character. So far, 
indeed, as the body is divided or weakened, the pressure it exerts 
on the individual is hindered, and the free play of its forces 
diminished. 2 

In the Church, then, we have the true school of character, the 
true ' home of individuality,' and sphere of spiritual edification. 
The normal course of spiritual growth is one of widely varied 
experiences ; it passes through the stage of repentance with its 
appropriate works ; it is schooled by the chastening discipline of 
common life ; 8 it is marked by progressive power of submission to 
the leadings of grace. This would suggest an interesting line of 
study, and one suitable for ethical treatment, but must not now 

1 Lyra Apostolica, No. xxxvii. [signed 5]. 

2 Consider Phil. ii. 2, where the description of the Christian example and 
character is prefaced by an impressive appeal for Unity. The moral guilt of 
heresy partly lies in its being a principle of disunion. Cyp., de Unit., xxvi., 
complains of particular ways in which disunion injures Christian character. 

3 Bruce (Expositor, No. 50, p. 84). 'God's paternal discipline, our own 
self-effort, Christ's example, priestly influence, and sympathy, all contribute 
to the same end, persistency and progress in the Christian life.' It is speci- 
ally instructive to contrast the Christian with the Pagan estimation of Labor, 
as a factor in the formation of character. See Martensen, Ethics (Social), 
p. 129. 



xii. Christian Ethics, 427 

detain us. It is advisable, however, in this connection not to over- 
look the subject of Christian ascetics ; a word which has often ex- 
cited unjust suspicion and contempt, and thereby been robbed of 
the noble associations which rightfully belong to it. 

The name ' ascetics ' is suitably applied to those Divinely 
sanctioned exercises which, by precept and example, Christ com- 
mended as aids to holiness, Prayer, Almsgiving, and Fasting. 
Reflection, indeed, shows that these ordinances occupy a con- 
spicuous place in the Gospel, because they have a natural connec- 
tion with the three principal spheres of Christian duty, — duty 
towards God, towards man, towards self. They are ways in which 
devotion to God, love to man, discipline of self, find each an 
appropriate expression. Reason and experience alike suggest that 
the Christian character, with its harmonious beauty and delicate 
strength, can only be the product of continuous spiritual discip- 
line, wise restraint, and regulated effort. A feature, therefore, of 
Christ's practical teaching is His provision for what is, to average 
human nature, at least a moral necessity. Presenting Himself as 
the supreme example of the freedom which can control and use 
circumstances for a spiritual end, He lays down the threefold rule 
of Christian ascetics to guide the wills and affections of those whom 
He calls to follow His steps. 

The end of discipline is, of course, freedom ; that is, the perfect 
dominion of the Spirit in man. Aiming at this liberty, the Chris- 
tian looks on the threefold ordinance of prayer, almsgiving, and 
fasting as a help to his development ; it is to him no mere arbi- 
trary direction imposed by authority, no vexatious restraint on 
lawful pleasure, but an efficacious aid to Christ-like holiness com- 
mended by the practice, and proved by the experience, of holy 
men in every age, and expressly enjoined by our Lord Himself. 1 

It may surprise us somewhat to find Prayer included among 
ascetic exercises. For prayer is the ordinary activity of the human 
spirit in relation to God ; man's natural expression of self-dedica- 
tion ; his effort to embrace God's Will as his choice, God's Law 
as his rule, God's Perfection as his pattern. Yet because prayer 
implies regularity, discipline, persevering effort ; because it has its 
different parts, its proper occasions and methods ; because it is the 
exercise of a distinct faculty, — in short, because it is an arduous 
work, it finds a place among exercises which seem at first sight to 
be of a more formal character. 

This will appear more clearly on consideration of the different 

1 For what follows, see especially the Lenten sermons of St. Leo. Also 
a very useful book by Canon Furse, Helps to Holiness. 



428 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

parts of prayer. Thus prayer is in part to be viewed as humble 
acknowledgment of an ideal unattained, and consequent renewal 
of desire in that direction. As containing, therefore, an element 
of self-purification, of striving after deeper self-knowledge, prayer 
includes the practice of self-examination and confession of sin. 
Regarded again as an exercise of affection and intellect, prayer 
takes the form of contemplation and communion with God as the 
supreme object of reverence and love. Thus it is evident that 
prayer is a real exercise, well fitted to be an education of the soul, 
and arduous because it implies an intense activity of the entire 
personality. Even the body has its share in this exercise. It is 
the appointed instrument of man's spiritual self-oblation ; and 
prayer is the acknowledgment not only that God is the * Father of 
spirits,' but that the body also ' is for the Lord.' 1 

Almsgiving is placed by Christ among known and admitted 
forms of devotion. Viewed simply as an action, it is an obvious 
outlet of Christian love to man. 2 But almsgiving has another 
aspect, on which early writers insist with some fulness. It is a 
means of grace, a purifying element in the spiritual life of the 
agent. It is not often, perhaps, that this side of the duty is ade- 
quately taught. The danger of ' charity ' becoming reckless or ill- 
directed is real, and may cause Christian teachers to be reticent 
on the subject. Yet this aspect of the truth must not be sup- 
pressed. And after all, almsgiving seems to be specially men- 
tioned by our Lord as a type of all works of mercy. 3 Love, in its 
effort to imitate God, need not be less discriminating than com- 
municative. The Fatherly providence of God is in fact the 
Christian's inspiration and his model ; and we interpret the scope 
of our Lord's commandment by study of His life Who ' for our 
sakes, though rich, became poor,' and ' went about doing good,' 
and who taught us in one pregnant sentence the mysterious efficacy 

1 i Cor. vi. 13. See Cyp., de orat. Dom., iv., on the part of the body in 
prayer. 

2 The particular shape which Almsgiving will assume is obviously to be 
' suggested by the special conditions ' of the age. See a noble passage in 
Ecce Homo [ed. 13], p. 184, pointing out the way in which the Christian 
spirit is likely to regard social problems. Cp. Martensen, Ethics (Social), 
p. 132. This point seems completely overlooked in the Service of Man, 
c. vii. 

3 Aug., Enchir., lxxii. : ' Multa sunt genera eleemosynarum, quae cum 
facimus adjuvamur.'' See also Cyp., de Op. et Eleem., xxv. Leo, in Quad., 
v. 4 ; de Res., i. 1 ; de Pent., i. 6, etc. ; Bruce, Parabolic Teaching, etc., pp. 
371-375, has some striking remarks. 



xii. Christian Ethics. 429 

of almsgiving. 1 It need not be added that true Christian charity 
is ever controlled by a due sense of the dignity of human nature, 
and of the moral bond that unites giver and receiver. 

Each of the three exercises under consideration is conditioned 
and aided by the other two. There is a specially close connection, 
however, between prayer and fasting. As a means of self- discip- 
line fasting has been strangely neglected. Some regard it as a 
burdensome restraint on the will ; others as ' unsuited to a spiritual 
religion ; ' others as unduly interfering with Christian liberty. 
Chiefly, perhaps, the neglect of fasting is due to inexperience of 
its value as a condition of spiritual power, and forgetfulness of the 
place assigned to it in the teaching of our Lord and of the early 
Church. It is thus right to insist, first, on its claim to be a Divine 
ordinance. 2 There can be nothing superfluous or incongruous in 
a practice which Christ is so careful to regulate, and which He 
commends by His own example. But the practice of fasting jus- 
tifies itself as a point of simple wisdom in the care of the personal 
life. Christian holiness requires, as we have seen, an inward unity 
of the personality, in which no one element has undue predomi- 
nance. Bodily instincts and passions, the powers of thought and 
imagination, the bias of temperament, — all have to be brought 
into subjection to the controlling will. And the result is a charac- 
ter exhibiting a due balance of different elements ; a chastened 
spirit of dependence, spiritualized affections, subdued thoughts, 
sober judgment, a purified heart, a sensitive conscience, a just fear 
of unbridled appetite, a true simplicity. Such is Christ-like holi- 
ness ; and one great condition of its attainment is fasting, chiefly 
in its literal sense of regular abstinence from food, 3 though its 
forms may be as varied as are the avenues of sense-impressions. 
The motive of fasting may not be always the same ; sometimes it 
is the expression of penitential sorrow for sin, or of the passion for 
inward purity ; sometimes it is used as a special aid to prayer ; 
sometimes, again, it is the sign of wearisome conflict with the 
lower nature : in any case it should be an exercise of love. Thus 
we regard fasting, not as mere soulless, joyless abstinence, but as a 
needful condition of purity, energy, vigor of will, clearness of moral 
insight, and capacity to impart spiritual gifts to our fellow-men. 
' Wise souls,' says St. Leo, ' mortify their bodies and crucify their 
senses ; and therein set before themselves God's will, loving them- 

1 St. Luke xi. 41. 

2 Leo, in Quad., xii. 2 : • In caslestibus Ecclesiae disciplinis, multum utili- 
tatis adferunt divinitus institute, jejunia.' Cp. Hooker, bk. v. § 72. 

3 Ep., ad Diogn., vi. : KaKaovpyov/xevrj aiTiois ical tt6tois 7) \fvxv fie^Tiovrat. 



43° The Religion of the Incarnation. 

selves the more, in proportion as for the love of God they love not 
themselves.' x 

Our apology for touching on topics so homely might well be 
that the practical aim of ethics gives such points importance. 
There can be no excuse needed, however, in days of wide-spread 
luxury and of much needlessly imperfect Christianity, for recalling 
and reasserting the necessity of the discipline, as well as of the 
moral precepts, of the Sermon on the Mount. 



V. Christ's teaching as to the Consummation of God's Kingdom. 

An outline of Christian Ethics would be incomplete without 
some reference to those eschatological truths which occupy so 
large a place in theology, and have so direct a bearing on morals. 
We have already touched on them in connection with the Chris- 
tian doctrine of the Chief Good. It remains to consider them in 
relation to the perfection of man's nature. 

The word ' perfection ' reminds us that there is a goal of the 
moral process exhibited in history. The visible order of the uni- 
verse and the history of mankind are verging towards a consum- 
mation, a catastrophe, which relatively to us must be regarded as 
an end. 

It is no part of our task to discuss the intermediate stage through 
which the kingdom of God is destined to pass : that stage in which 
there is to be a supreme manifestation of moral evil, a culmination 
of those tendencies and an outburst of those forces which already 
seem to threaten not the framework merely, but the foundations of 
society. The decay of Christian Churches, the profound corrup- 
tion of social life, the tyranny of materialistic lawlessness, — these 
seem to be plainly foretold in Scripture, and with a purpose : that 
of shielding men from a moral despair which might paralyze their 
efforts, or undermine their patience, as they witness the beginnings 
of these ' birth-pangs ' 2 of a new order. The Christian will ever 
guard against such a temper of alienation, or self-isolation, from 
the world, as will lead him to depreciate the national, political, 
or civil movements of his time. For civilization is appointed to 
reach, through whatever convulsions, an ethical consummation, 
the prospect of which must inspire strength to labor, and patience 
to endure. 

1 Serm. de Pass., xix. 5. Cp. Martensen, Ethics (Indiv.), p. 160; Mar- 
tineau, Types, etc., ii. 381. 

2 St. Matt. xxiv. 8 : dpxh wUvuv. 



xii. Christian Ethics, 431 

The last stage of the kingdom of God is one of glory, to be 
exhibited in the perfection of the moral community. It is for this 
that creation waits ; to this, as the goal of history, that inspired 
prophecy points. Two revealed truths are intended to guide our 
perception of this prospect. 

In the first place, the kingdom of God is to be finally manifested 
in its true character : x an event which must involve momentous 
consequences for the physical creation. Scripture sometimes 
speaks as if beneath the outer semblance of visible nature there 
lay concealed an inner glory, destined, when the semblance 
passes, to shine forth in full radiance and splendor. 2 The truth is 
thus symbolically conveyed, that since man is the crown and lord 
of the physical universe, his final emancipation will carry with it a 
corresponding change in his outward environment. But this con- 
summation, no less than the progressive movement of mankind 
towards it, is due to the deliberate working and intervention in 
history of God Himself. Naturalism points to a precarious pros- 
pect of human happiness in the future, as contingent upon ' a 
perfect adjustment of society.' 3 Christianity does not look to any 
improvement in material conditions, nor to any social process, as 
likely to bring about an ideal state of humanity. Neither the 
physical universe, nor man himself, can attain to the goal of their 
development, or to the perfection of their nature, apart from God. 4 

Again, the kingdom of God is to be purified through Judgment 
The exact nature of this judgment it is impossible for thought to 
anticipate. But the teaching of revelation is at least so explicit as 
to discredit any conception of the judgment which would confine 
its operation to this present scene, or restrict its meaning to any 
merely natural process. The judgment is, in fact, appointed for a 
definite hour, and is prefigured in definite historical catastrophes. 
It will be parallel to, but transcending, those manifestations of 
Divine power in history which mankind has already experienced. 
And the effect of this final intervention will be to put an end to 
that mixed condition of human things which it is our tendency to 
accept and assume as inevitable and perpetual. Out of God's 
kingdom will be gathered ' all things that offend ; ' and the col- 
lective mass of humanity will be, with whatever gradations in the 
stage of perfection attained by each individual, a ' congregation of 
saints.' 5 The principle of Good will so achieve its final triumph. 

When we further inquire, as we are impelled to do, what will be 

1 Rom. viii. 19. 2 1 Cor. vii. 31 ; 1 St. John ii. 17, etc. 

8 Cp. The Ethics of Socialism, by E. Belfort Bax, p. 19. 
4 Cp. Bern., de Consid., v 11. 5 Ps. cxlix. 1. 



43 2 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

the extent of this final triumph, we are met by the fact of our own 
ignorance, and of Christ's reserve. His simple, severe statements 
seem intended to discourage fruitless speculation. We are thrown 
back in this, as in other perplexities, on our unfailing assurance 
of God's character, and on the faint analogies furnished by the 
present order of things. 

The Gospel speaks of a righteous dominion, the sphere of which 
is to be without limit. We read of a gathering into the kingdom 
of all that is in true harmony with its purpose. We find warrant 
for the belief in an intermediate state in which imperfect character 
may be developed, ignorance enlightened, sin chastened, desire 
purified. And yet we are assured that the consequences of action 
and choice abide, and are eternal in their issue ; and we know that 
impenitence must finally, and under awful conditions, separate the 
soul from God. But we have not enough for a coherent system. 
All that we can affirm is that the victory of Good seems to demand 
the preservation of all that has not wilfully set itself in antagonism to 
Divine Love, Holiness, and Power. We cannot think that helpless 
ignorance, or inevitable poverty of character will finally sever a 
human soul from God. Analogy suggests that there will be scope 
in a future dispensation for the healing ministries and inventive 
service of Love. So again, Scripture does not expressly teach that 
the lost will forever be in a state of defiance and rebellion. Even 
in the awful state of final severance from the Divine presence there 
is room for assent, order, acceptance of penalty ; and so far, evil, 
in the sense of the will antagonistic to God's righteous Law, may 
have ceased to exist. Truth will have prevailed ; and all orders of 
intelligent creatures will render it homage. The final issue will be 
seen, and the justice confessed, of all those ' ways ' of God which 
are 'unsearchable and past finding out.' In a word, there will be 
a complete manifestation of supreme Holiness and Love ; of Him 
whose ' mercy is over all His works,' and Who will continue to stand 
in direct relation to every soul that He has made, revealing Him- 
self to each either as loving Father or as righteous Judge. 1 

It must however be added that what is called ' Universalism ' finds 
no support either in the solemn statements of Jesus Christ or in 
the analogy of nature. Man's very power of choice implies the 
possibility of a sinful state admitting neither of repentance nor of 
remedy ; not of repentance, — for character, growing by separate 
acts of choice, may become fixed and hardened in its persistent 

1 See the Bp. of Exeter's Primary Charge on this subject. On the princi- 
ple involved in this ' dual classification/ see an impressive passage in Mar- 
tineau, Types, etc. ii 65-69. 



xii. Christian Ethics. 433 

refusal of the good ; not of remedy, — for, as even the Greek 
moralist, with all his belief in the moulding power of law, confesses, 
there is a degree of moral perversion ' incurable,' — that, namely, 
which ensues when sin has finally destroyed the faculties to which 
moral appeal is possible : desire, fear, hope, affection, the sense of 
shame. 

With the end of history corresponds that of the individual man. 
The ultimate perfection of human character is not only regarded as 
possible in Scripture, but is suggested by analogy; 1 and of the 
conditions of perfected human nature we are enabled to form some 
idea, partly by our knowledge of angelic beings, partly by a study 
of our Lord's Humanity in its risen state. 2 

i. Thus human personality, in its perfected form, implies a state 
of harmony. As each element in human nature will be preserved 
in its appropriate condition, so each will fulfil its rightful function. 3 
The relation between body and spirit will be that which is ethically 
the highest conceivable. In man will be represented, as in a 
microcosm, a state of being in which the first creation has been 
appropriated by, and made the organ of the Divine Spirit. 4 The 
material body will become one perfectly subservient to, and ex- 
pressive of, the free movements of a purified spirit. 5 And to this 
state of personality will belong a final harmony between moral law 
and freedom. Human beings will have become { partakers of the 
Divine Nature,' so far as to experience in themselves the union of 
liberty, holiness, and love : — 

' Indulging every instinct of the soul 
There where law, life, joy, impulse, are one thing.' 6 

ii. Perfection further implies a state of glory ; a word which, 
whether used of Christ Himself or of His followers, seems in the 
New Testament to mean the outward manifestation of a holy 

1 2 Cor. v. 5 ; Col. i. 28 ; Butler, Analogy, i. c. 5. 

2 St. Luke xx. 36 : IcrdyyeXoi . . . nal viol elcriv deov rrjs dvaardo'ecos viol 
ovres. Cp. Leo. Magn., Serm. in Res. Dom. L c. 4. 

3 Vine, Lirin., Common., c. xiii. : ' Unoquoque hominum sine fine victuro, 
in unoquoque hominum sine fine necessario utriusque substantia? differentia 
permanebit.' 

4 Dorner, System, etc., § 2. 

5 Aug., de Fid. et Symb., xiii. : ' Spirituale corpus intelligitur quod ita 
spiritui subditum est, ut caelesti habitationi conveniat.' The Resurrection of 
the flesh is thus seen to have vital relation to the idea of moral perfection. 
Cp. Thom. Aquin., Summa, i. ii ae . Qu. iv. Art. 6-8. 

6 Iren., iv. 28, 2 : ' Hi semper percipiunt regnum, et proficiunt.' Pet. 
Lomb., Sent., ii. xxv. 7 : ' Post confirmationem vero. . . nee vinci poterit nee 
premi [homo] ; et tunc habebit non posse peccare' 

28 



434 The Religion x)f the Incarnation. 

character. The gradual assimilation to God, which is the law of 
true human development on earth, is the law of an unending 
progress. But in the perfect state, character will find due splen- 
dor of outward expression. Man's bodily frame will pass through 
successive stages ' from glory to glory,' to a semblance faithfully 
reflecting the inward supernatural life. 1 And in the marvellous 
union of outward with inward re-creation consists the ' glory,' of 
which human nature is capable. 

iii. Perfection is consummated by blessedness. The conception 
of bliss as transcending happiness (evhai/xovLa) is peculiar to Chris- 
tian Ethics. Happiness is a word of earth, and represents a good 
which may be attained independently of life in God. Bliss is 
inseparable from a living relation to God. It implies union with 
God. 

But though it is true that * man possesses the plenitude of his 
perfection in God,' the analogy of the present dispensation points 
to a further element in ' blessedness,' namely, that of fellowship in 
a moral community : the redeemed ' have fellowship one with 
another ' in an ' indissoluble life.' 2 In fact the perfection of the 
individual, according to God's separate ideal for each, demands 
that of the moral community. Blessedness thus means that state 
wherein, by a society of renewed personal beings, ' the Highest 
Good is loved and enjoyed.' 3 

This community of free and perfected beings, with God as its 
Centre, is the revealed ethical consummation of our race. And 
as the manifestation of God's kingdom is to Christians the supreme 
object of aspiration, and the highest matter of prayer, so the effort 
to advance and extend its sphere is the worthiest task that can be 
embraced by the will. The conception of such a kingdom, to be 
made actual through the exertion of human faculties co-operating 
with the invincible energy of the Divine will, is the greatest 
thought that ever enriched mankind. In the attempt to further 
the limits, or promote the welfare of this kingdom, man finds his 
truest happiness, and his noblest field of activity. For he is 
engaged in the same work as God Himself : 4 he has the same 
interest in its accomplishment. He has found the absolutely good 
sphere of effort and desire ; all else in which men busy themselves 
can only be ethically good in proportion as it bears on, or hastens 
the approach of, that ' one far-off Divine event.' 

1 St. Matt. xiii. 43 ; 2 Cor. iii. 18 ; 1 St. John iii. 2. 

2 1 St. John i. 3-7 ; Heb. vii. 16 ; Westcott, Hist. Faith, p. 147. 

3 Aug., de mor. Eccl., iv. ['Beata vita,] cum id quod est hominis optimum, 
amatur et habetur.' 

4 epya dcov, St. John vi. 28. Cp. St. Matt. vi. 33. 



xii. Christian Ethics. 435 



VI. Conclusion. 

It is our Lord's method to present to men an ideal, before He 
descends to the requirements of practical life. The Sermon on 
the Mount describes the life of ' blessedness ' before it treats of 
duty ; and from duty, passes to the means of holiness. Such an 
example suggests one or two concluding reflections. 

First we may recall the true bearing of a methodical inquiry into 
Christian Ethics. The kingdom of God stands in contrast with, 
but in special relation to, all modes and products of social activity. 
It makes use of all the material which human life offers, or human 
faculties supply, so far as it is capable of serving a Divine purpose, 
or revealing any aspect of the Divine Life. For that Life having 
once for all intervened in history, continues ever to appropriate 
and hallow all that comes within the wide range of Its outflow ; 
Education, Criticism, Science, Art ; Industry, Wealth ; Law, Polity, 
— all these are capable of becoming ethical forces, of ministering 
to man's true end, of contributing something to the highest life. 
Into the Holy City the kings of the earth bring their glory and 
honor : and to a Christian Church are addressed the far-reaching 
words, ' All things are yours.' 1 

There is in fact a ' world-appropriating ' element in Christianity, 
as the ethical religion ; and it is essential that the significance of 
this fact should be grasped, if Christian morality is to be rightly 
apprehended, or fairly presented in systematic form. 

Further, in advancing a claim to mould and regenerate human 
society, the Christian Church can only continue to rely on her tra- 
ditional instrument, — the re-creation of individual character. The 
social movements which an enlightened Christian judgment 
approves, are those gradual and irresistible changes which result 
from the slowly reached apprehension of some neglected moral 
truth, as it gradually commends itself to individual consciences. 
And such movements are to be judged as they display, or bear 
upon, character. If, for example, a Christian mistrusts the extrava- 
gant schemes of some forms of Socialism, — it is not because he is 
insensible to the wrongs and miseries which suggest a violent rem- 
edy, but because all such sweeping proposals would merge the 
individual life, would repress and mar the fulness of that organized 
social life which gains elements of richness and diversity from the 
free play of individuality. 

1 I Cor. iii. 22. 



436 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

The study of ideals will also have suggested the relation which 
the Church bears to modern life. The Church, we have seen, is 
the school of human character ; the nurse, therefore, of such civil 
and social virtues as give stability to human institutions. In her 
midst, Divine forces are really and manifestly at work, tending to 
bring about the regeneration of mankind. And in connection 
with this view of the Church, we need to observe the power of 
character; the practical 'supremacy of goodness,' or at least its 
tendency to be supreme ; its capacity to control and modify the 
pressure of circumstance. A condition of all true thinking about 
the social future will surely be a just estimate of character as a 
social and industrial force ; it is a growing sense of this truth that 
is doing much to revolutionize our economic theories. We are 
learning, perhaps, that manfulness, mercy, self-control, pity, are 
among the forces which must be taken into account by social 
science. 

And if the Church is a gift of God to mankind, and there be 
but one end of all His gifts, namely, the restoration of His image 
in man, we must believe that the fairest fruits of Christianity, and 
the many-sided fulness of Christ-like character, can appear only in 
those who live loyal to the moral discipline of the Church, who 
are ruled by her wisdom, chastened by awe of her beauty, pene- 
trated by her spirit. The kingdom of God is more — infinitely 
more — than an ideal condition of human society ; but we know that 
the kingdom, even in this limited sense of the word, will be the heri- 
tage only of a nation ' bringing forth the fruits thereof.' 



APPENDIX ON SOME ASPECTS OF CHRISTIAN 
DUTY. 

The conception of morality as a system of positive Divine Law, 
and the ' juridical method ' which is said to mark early Christian 
writers on ethics, 1 is perhaps attributable to the growth of an im- 
perial spirit in the Church when she found herself confronted with 
the task of reducing to order the social chaos into which the fall of 
the Empire plunged Europe. St. Leo may be said to embody this 
spirit in a majestic personal form. The mark of Roman authority 
rests on the ordinances of the Church of this period. It may be that 
her rules of duty wear something of the aspect of a fixed, unvarying 
code. The moral problems with which she has to deal are compara- 
tively simple ; they admit of clear, concise treatment, in accordance 
with a fixed system of discipline ; sharp distinctions are possible : 
and the Gospel thus presents to the world the features of an external 
Law. 

Be this as it may, widely different conditions seem now to demand 
a definite system of Christian duty, — a study of 'special' or 'applied 
ethics.' The main feature of modern life is not social disorganization, 
but complexity of relationships; and although in the abstract no such 
thing is possible as a 'conflict of duties; ' yet it is clear that duty is 
not always simple, or obvious. We need in fact something like a 
system of casuistry ; of ethics applied to novel spheres, and special 
points of obligation. It is indeed reasonable to expect that as civili- 
zation advances, and new realms open up which the Christian spirit 
must appropriate, the Law of duty will be enriched ; there will be 
expansion of its content : e. g. the development of Industry makes 
desirable the formulation of the ' Ethics of Labor; ' the rise of a spe- 
cial class may raise the question whether 'class virtues' are to be 
recognized, and how they are to be estimated, by Ethics. 2 

In this appendix some purpose may be served by noticing a few 
pressing moral problems of our time; some spheres of duty as to 
which guidance or development of principles seems called for. 

i. In the sphere of self-regarding duty a point which needs atten- 
tion is the truth of personal responsibility. There are influences at 
work which threaten the sense of accountability, whether for conduct 
or belief. ^ There are of course speculative difficulties surrounding 
the question of freedom; there is wide misconception of its true 

1 Sidgwick, Outlines, etc., p. 108. 

2 These are perhaps implied in St. Luke iii. 10-14. 



43 8 The Religion of the Incarnation. 

meaning; but it needs to be clearly taught, that granted all limita- 
tions of the power of choice, moral responsibility remains for the 
use of the character, as of the property, which a man inherits. 1 A 
man's moral constitution, rigidly defined though it be by heredity, 
is yet his 'heritage,' his natural endowment, for the right direction 
of which he is responsible. The weak sense of this plain fact is 
noticeable in the lax and indulgent tone often used respecting crim- 
inals. ' To some of us,' it has been justly said, 'the individual is 
always innocent, and society always guilty.' 2 The degree of guilt, 
however, may be minimized {e.g. by the plea of ignorance), while the 
fact of it remains. 

In this connection statistics of crime have a value which needs to 
be estimated. Do they point to conditions of society which must be 
faced as unalterable ? or do they not rather usefully indicate the 
proper channels into which the stream of social energy should be 
directed ? 

Again, in the matter of personal belief, it is often assumed that 
there is no responsibility. The question, however, for each indi- 
vidual, if rightly stated, is simply this : ' What has been my attitude 
towards that which has presented itself to me as truth ? ' 3 

Another point of importance is the moral culture of Imagination, 
in relation chiefly to aesthetic recreation in its different forms, the 
Theatre, the pursuit of Art, the reading of Fiction. We are learning 
by serious experience the enormous power of fancy to kindle passion, 
and to color human actions. In view of the spread of depraving liter- 
ature, energetic assertion of duty towards this department of person- 
ality is needed. Such duty seems to be recognized in Phil. iv. 8. 

2. Passing to the sphere of family obligations, it is natural to 
remark on the break-up of family life which is so common a conse- 
quence of highly-developed industry. The employment of women in 
factories, etc., tends to make them unfit for domestic duties; while 
that of children encourages a spirit of independence which is not 
without social danger; thus not only the sense of parental duty, but 
the respect for parental authority, is impaired. Christians are bound 
to discountenance, or at least to counteract, this state of things so far 
as it interferes with the rudiments of moral discipline. 

The pressing need of our day, however, would appear to be some 
clear teaching on the subject of marriage. There are different as- 
pects of the marriage contract recognized in Scripture. But Chris- 
tianity can make no terms with those theories which have borne fruit 
in lax legislation on divorce, with all its mischievous results. Mar- 
riage, according to the Christian view, is a serious vocation, with its 
own sacred duties, and special consecration. Improvident marriage 
is as immoral from a Christian as from an anti-Christian point of 
view. 4 Ethical considerations ought to guide or restrict the intention 

1 Cp. Mr. Cotter Morison, Service of Man, p. 214. 

2 R. W. Dale', Cont. Rev., May, 1889. Consider St. Lukexxiii. 34. 

3 See Dean Church, Human Life and its Conditions, Serm. Ill, init. 

4 See Service of Man, pref. xxv. foil. 



Appendix. 439 

to marry ; and with regard to the question of population, Christianity 
condemns any theory which offers a substitute for rational self- 
restraint. The true end of marriage, again, is something higher than 
4 happiness ; ' it is appointed for the mutual enrichment of personality, 
mutual freedom to fulfil the true ideal of human life. The whole 
subject has indeed become involved in difficulties which cannot be 
encountered by any mere statement of principles. There is no doubt, 
however, of the end which the Christian treatment of this point must 
keep in view. 

3. As to the social sphere generally, we begin by remarking that, 
from the Christian standpoint, every transaction between man and 
man is to be regarded as personal, and therefore ethical. The most 
significant fact perhaps of our time is the process of transition from 
(so-called) political to ethical economics. To reason rightly on social 
problems we must ever have regard to personality. For ethical pur- 
poses the. abstract terms Capital, Labor, Production, Wealth, etc., 
must be replaced by personal terms, Employer, Employe", Producer, 
Man of Wealth, etc. Our problem is how to supersede the technical 
and legal relation by the personal. 1 

This being our fundamental point of view, we find that ethics will 
treat equally of rights and duties. A Christian theory of rights is 
required. The prevailing view of them is individualistic. It is 
forgotten that the rights of one man have their ground in the obliga- 
tions of another; they are limited by the claims of other personal- 
ities on our own; 'right' is, in fact, a condition making possible the 
fulfilment of duty. It is thus a matter of Christian concern (to sug- 
gest mere examples) that workers should attain to the possibility of 
free self -development : healthy conditions of work, the enjoyment of 
domestic life, security of maintenance, perhaps permanence of con- 
tract, opportunities of recreation and culture, — everything, in fact, 
which will give them fair chance of healthful and worthy human life. 
Christianity can be content with nothing short of this. 

On the other hand duties call for notice. Modern capitalists form 
a class whose responsibilities it is difficult adequately to measure. 
The general principle, however, is easily repeated : that it is the duty 
of the wealthy, or those who employ workers, to respect the person- 
ality of their' employes, to treat them not as machines, but as men. 
Thomas Carlyle well describes the aim that should guide this influ- 
ential class : ' to be a noble master among noble workers, the first 
ambition : to be a rich master, only the second.' 

Industrial development indeed brings into prominence many ques- 
tions of duty and right, which can be solved only by deeper ap- 
prehension of the Christian standpoint : and of ' morality as an 

1 See Ingram, Pres. Condition and Prospects of Pol. Economy, p. 18: 
• By habitually regarding labor from the abstract point of view, and over- 
looking the personality of the laborer, economists are led to leave out of 
account some of the considerations which most seriously affect the condition 
of the working man,' etc. Cp. Carlyle, Past and Present, the last book. 



440 



The Religion of the Incarnation. 



industrial force:' 1 for the ties which bind men in the relation of 
brotherhood and sonhood are the noblest and strongest. 

The duties of a state are matters of controversy, and open a field 
not lightly to be entered. It is clear, however, that adequate pressure 
can only be brought to bear on governing classes by an educated 
public opinion, rather we should say an enlightened moral sense, in 
the community. It is impossible to foresee the results that might 
ensue from the growth of moral opinion on such points as the state 
regulation of vice, the just causes of war, the restriction of the hours 
of labor, the treatment of semi-civilized dependencies, the true lines 
to be followed by education. It is this tremendous potency of public 
opinion that points to the great need of modern democracy : the edu- 
cation, namely, of feeling and character ; the cultivation of reverence 
and the faculty of admiration, of self-control and sobriety in judgment 
and thought. How far a merely intellectual training will produce this 
character can scarcely be a matter of controversy. A vast field of 
inquiry and study is thus evidently open to economic moralists : and 
it has been opportunely suggested that the effort to study, ' in the 
light of the revealed will of God, the intricate problems of society,' 
might be a common bond between different sections of Christendom, 
and might promote that unity of God's Church, which is the true 
condition of effectual social reform. 2 

4. In the Church, or moral community which embraces and leavens 
the state, special points of duty arise : e. g. respecting the limits of 
the Church's self-adaptation to the tendencies of the age, and her 
relation to the anti-Christian principle in society. Hence arise diffi- 
cult questions as to the true bases of Toleration, and of submission 
to the civil power. We may be sure that principles of action and 
thought can be reached only by closer study of Christ's words in rela- 
tion to modern life, 3 as the practical instinct of the Church has inter- 
preted them. A similar problem is raised by the advance of Science 
and Criticism. Christians are charged with being behind scientific 
men in their apprehension of 'the morals of assent.' 4 Whatever 
truth there is in such a reproach, it at least utters a note of warning. 

5. Once more, if we consider the non-personal realm with which 
man is brought in contact, we must face the problem of duties towards 
the lower animals. We have seen that such duties have a ground in 
reason: but their nature and extent are not well defined. It is im- 
portant to study our Lord's attitude towards nature, for which He 
uniformly exhibits, especially in His parables and miracles, such 
feeling and love. The practice of vivisection, for example, raises a 
question as to the limits of the dominium naturtz committed to man ; 



1 See the chapter with this title in T. E. Brown, Studies in Modern Social- 
ism and Labor Problems, c. xii. 

2 See an Article on ' Christian Union/ by Earl Nelson, Cont. Rev., Feb. 
1889. 

3 See Martensen, Ethics (Ind.), § 93. Dean Church, Gifts of Civilization, 
Serm. II. 

4 Mr. Huxley in Nineteenth Century for Nov. 1887. 



Appendix. 441 

and his right to employ creaturely life as a means. There is of course 
a practice of vivisection which is utterly immoral : as when it is 
prompted by mere pleasure in experimenting, or by idle curiosity ; 
or is carried on without strict intention and reasonable prospect of 
meeting a particular need. 

Within the limits of an essay it would be presumptuous to do more 
than raise such questions as the foregoing ; we perhaps best display 
a sense of their gravity by leaving them as suggestions for systematic 
discussion. For it has been justly observed with regard to ethical 
problems that ' the actual solution is itself an art, a gift which cannot 
be taught.' 



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